Fasting Forty Days and Forty Nights

In Kafka's short story "The Hunger Artist", is an interesting short story, which follows his style of writing strange, and somewhat disturbing short stories, like "The Metamorphosis".

When I first saw the title, I thought it was a bit strange, since I thought it would be more about an artist that was struggling to make ends meet, but then that would've been the hungry artist, and not the hunger artist.  After going through the story, I realized, it was an artist that was trying to use hunger itself as an art form, which is a strange idea, since hunger is usually not something that one appreciates, which can bring up the question, what is art?

While going through the story, I thought it was very peculiar that the man was able to fast for such a long time, considering the human body can only last a couple weeks without food, and merely only days without water, yet this man was able to last for months, maybe even years (since there was no count of the number of days he fasted at the end) without dying.  This makes the story a rather mundane fantasy, since the only incredible thing was how much a man could starve himself.  Even the extent of 40 days seems unbelievable, yet the character still wanted to continue, despite him appearing to be half-dead even at that marker of time.

With reference to the 40 days of fasting, which was set as the limit, I thought it was an interesting choice of number, since, assuming one has any knowledge of the Bible, that makes one think of the story when Jesus Christ fasted for forty days and forty nights, and was then tempted of the devil.  This might make one think that the protagonist is some sort of Messiah-like figure, but that turns out to not be the case, since all he does is fast for who knows how long before his death.