Starving for Meaning

Abstract This article offers a reassessment of Kafka's “A Hunger Artist” through the lens of asceticism. Initially interpreted as a critique of self-destructive fasting, the story is reread as an elegy for the loss of genuine ascetic ideals and the transcendent meaning they once embodied. By contrasting the hunger artist's performative fasting with traditional spiritual disciplines, the article argues that Kafka mourns a vanished world where spiritual striving and belief in self-transformation were possible. The story thus becomes a reflection on modernity's spiritual impoverishment and a yearning for a world where meaning, discipline, and transcendence once held sway.