[In the following excerpt, Ingram examines the theme of anxiety in "A Hunger Artist. "]

Situations which excite and heighten anxiety abound in "A Hunger Artist": the fasting showman is forcibly isolated (in a cage) from the community of man. He is questing toward a goal which he is not allowed to reach. Each step toward that goal leads him closer and closer to death. The shift of interest in fasting threatens the economic security of the Impresario and the stability of the Lebensweise of the showman. His audience does not understand the hunger artist. Many of them suspect him of cheating. They lock him in a cage, exhibit him, and limit his freedom.

Felix Weltsch wrote that "A Hunger Artist" actually includes four stories in one. "Im Grunde," he says,

besteht diese Geschichte aus vier Geschichten, vier Entwicklungslinien mit verschiedenem Sinn, die ineinander verflochten sind; die äußere Geschehen ist ihnen natürlich gemeinsam, aber der Sinn dieses Geschehens ist vielfaltig. Man braucht nur zu fragen: was ist der Sinn dieses Unternehmens, in Schaustellungen vor dem Publikum zu hungern?

Four simultaneous accurate answers can be given to that question, he says, forming four Sinnlinien to the story: (1) Hungern als Sensation—public fasting provides an outlet for the curiosity of the people; (2) Hungern als Geschäft — it provides security for the hunger artist and his manager; (3) Hungern als eine Angelegenheit der Ehre—it provides a challenge which the fasting showman is proud to prove he can meet; and (4) Hungern aus Ekel vor dem Essen—it is unavoidable. Each of these Sinnlinien supplies a convenient basis for analysis of anxiety-factors in the story.

The first, Hungern als Sensation, provokes anxiety superficially for the public, the hunger artist, and the Impresario, but serves at the same time to distract them from more fundamental problems. The Impresario has the constant worry of staging a good show, of keeping the audience interested and the hunger artist alive. The hunger artist's contact with the suspicious and disbelieving public; his awareness that the nature of his performance and abilities is being falsified by the manager; and his constant frustration that he can never exercise his talents fully, since he is forced to come out of his cage and take food on the fortieth day—all these cast him into melancholy. At the same time, concern for his reputation distracts him from the more fundamental issue—that if he were actually allowed to fast on and on, he would die. His discontent with the particulars of the show keep him from a too acute awareness of the freakish nature of his death-bearing life.

In the same way, the public's intense concern over the trappings of the show distract them from the normally terrifying condition of its chief actor. The show on the fortieth day of the fast is structured in such a way as to allow the public to gather in calm community before the show-stall of a man whose life is a living reminder of the approach of death. The ritual has been carefully arranged. Everything contributes toward calming the crowds: loud triumphant strains blare from the military band; pronouncements of doctors announce facts not about the health of the hunger artist, but about his physical measurements; two chosen women help the artist from his flower-bedecked cage; attendants stand ready to step in when the women's tears of discomfort cause them to relinquish their burden; the Impresario forces food through the teeth of the starving skeleton while keeping up a cheerful patter to distract the public's attention from his condition; finally, a toast is drunk not to the faster but to the public. All this, as well as the official act of watching, was arranged "zur Beruhigung der Massen."

Hungern als Geschäft evokes anxiety superficially in the public but profoundly in the hunger artist and his manager. The public is aware of the financial dimensions of the fasting showman's act; the fact that what he is doing is his business and his mode of support increases the suspicions of those members of the public who are not Eingeweihten. The public appoints official watchers to assure individuals (who cannot watch day and night themselves) that the hunger artist has not, indeed, taken any food for forty days. Even then, only a few ever seem really to believe that his show is real and not just a trick. They crowd around his cage day and night to satisfy themselves that they are not being cheated.

The hungering of the fasting showman provides economic security for the showman's manager, who when the shift of interest is setting in, races frantically over Europe trying to reignite the dying spark—but all in vain. He can, however, turn to another job—perhaps managing another kind of show that is in fashion. But the hunger artist is too old to change his profession. Besides he was "allzu fanatisch ergeben" to hungering to change. He still hopes to astound the world by hitherto unknown exhibitions. Never having done anything in his life, since he was so busy letting other people do things to him—he knows only one course of action: fasting on and on. Since das Publikum has lost interest in him, however, he has only his motive of honor to comfort him; only his knowledge that he is striving after an unreachable goal, toward unimaginable achievements in the profession of fasting. That brings us to the third Sinnlinie, Hungern als eine Angelegenheit der Ehre.

While the public busies itself with torchlights and the appointment of official watchers, the initiates realize that "die Ehre seiner Kunst" forbids the hunger artist from taking any food during his fasting period, and that he could not even be forced to eat during this time. The vast majority of the population, however, could not be expected to understand this. When the hunger artist sits melancholy in his cage during the final stages of the fast, well-meaning people try to comfort him with the animadversion that anyone who had fasted so long must surely be out of spirits. This throws the hunger artist into a rage. For he has constantly boasted that he can fast much longer than forty days—indeed almost indefinitely. But the public and the Impresario would not permit this. The Impresario even tried to disprove his boast by photographs. They had robbed him of honor again and again by cutting short his fast. This, he would always contend, was the root of his melancholy. And after he had become only a "Hindernis auf dem Weg zu den Ställen" he strove, without opposition, to reach those goals he had set himself, to fast to the limits of his abilities, which he felt had "keine Grenzen." Despite the occasional remark by a passing skeptic that he was a swindle and a cheat, the hunger artist "arbeitete ehrlich, aber die Welt betrog ihm um seinen Lohn."

The hunger artist openly told his audience that fasting for him was the easiest thing in the world. Only in the final scene, however, did he dare mention to anyone (hardly even to himself) that he was helpless to do otherwise. Sitting alone in his cage, perhaps the realization of his freakish incapacity joined with his other thoughts to cause his sadness and dissatisfaction with himself—which his public attributed to his fasting too long and which he attributed to his not fasting long enough.

In the last portion of the story, the Sinnlinie, Hungern aus Ekel vor dem Essen, assumes centrality. The hungerer confesses at the end that he had to fast because he could not find the food he liked. During his period of isolation and silence, he has ceased to be proud of his fundamental human defect—the inability to eat. All his other passivities, arguments, boasts, and concerns had helped him to distract himself sufficiently from the important death-threatening and anxiety-provoking fact that he was unfit to live. Left alone far from the crowds, he could no longer turn his face away from the reality of his approaching death. The general public, on the other hand, could always find something else to fill the void left by the hunger artist's death. Soon enthusiastic onlookers surround his cage in which now a fresh life-loving leopard tears raw meat in his teeth.

The anxiety theme, then, is conveyed in "A Hunger Artist" primarily through the changes of circumstances which the passing of time brings with it. Structurally pivotal terminology of anxiety follows a different pattern than that of ["First Sorrow" and "A Little Woman"], because it is more prominently the terminology of the passing of time, of misunderstanding, and of unachieved goals. Some of the terms used earlier, however, recur here, though not necessarily at key positions in the story: Beruhigung der Massen, das beruhigte Publikum, ruhige, Ruhepausen, quälender, störte, unzufrieden, Unzufriedenheit, befriedigt, Trost, Verdächtigungen, Urteil, and so forth. The emphasis, however, centers on anxiety caused by being a creature of time, a creature whose life is packaged out in boxes of forty days each, a creature who dreams of fasting without limitation, but whose physical nature sets a limit on all his activities.