A man who fasts as performance art, exhibited in a cage, slowly forgotten by the public that once adored him. Kafka wrote this story as he was dying of tuberculosis, unable to eat, and the parallel between artist and author makes it almost unbearably poignant. The prose is characteristically clear, cool, and dreamlike. The ending, when it comes, reframes everything. In a few pages, Kafka captures the loneliness of artistic vocation, the impossibility of being truly understood, and something even darker about the nature of appetite itself.