“‘Because I,’ said the starving artist, lifted his little head slightly and whispered with lips pursed as if in a kiss into the ear of the overseer, so that nothing would go to waste, ‘because I could not find the food I like. If I had found it, believe me, I wouldn’t have caused any fuss, I would have filled my belly just like you, and like everyone else.’”
The short story A Hunger Artist, the swan song of Franz Kafka, tells the life of an anonymous and now forgotten artist who, despite achieving professional recognition, failed to satisfy his “hunger” due to the waning interest of the public in his art.
The Aphorisms, written in two different periods, at first glance appear to be disparate and disconnected thoughts. However, scholars have highlighted them as a cohesive whole that expresses Kafkaesque anxiety and they have even been characterized as Kafka's “private theology.”
These are two major works written by Kafka, after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and published posthumously.
