[In the following excerpt, Medeiros asserts that Kafka's hunger artist exhibits the same characteristics as actual anorexics.]

[Kafka's Hunger Artist,] in his voluntary denial of any form of consumption . . . approximates the actual behavior of anorexics. Kafka's story, like most of his writing, hinges on a paradox and the resulting aporia—in this case, the confession made by the Hunger Artist, just before he expires, that he never ate "because [he] could not find the food that [he] liked." This crucial statement both questions the entire foundation for the nameless artist's existence—his capacity and wish to withstand hunger indefinitely—and negates his claim to artistic talent, because he appears to relegate all his actions to a fundamental experience of lack, the impossibility of finding food to his taste. Yet such a last denial of himself and of his art must be seen as an extension, perhaps in absolute form, of his previous practice of total denial of consumption (which brings about his death) and therefore as a final affirmation, in negative terms, of the Hunger Artist's project all along: a refusal to partake of food, parallel to the desire to set himself apart from society and even from humanity. The Hunger Artist tells his night watchers ("usually, strangely enough, butchers"), he "starved (hungerte) like none of them could."

To this determination to prove his superiority through his control of appetite one could add at least two other characteristics, and all are common to anorexic behavior: (1) the exhibitionism inherent in the Hunger Artist's concept of art (Schauhunger, "exhibition fasting"), which makes his body an object for popular marvel either as an independent curiosity show or in conjunction with a circus; and (2) the determined attempt to resist any efforts to stop the fast and the ultimate surrender to outside force, leading to his almost involuntary feeding:

. . . finally came two young ladies . . . [who] wanted to lead the Hunger Artist down a couple of steps out of the cage, to where a carefully chosen diet meal (Krankenmahlzeit) had been served on a small table. And at this moment the Hunger Artist always resisted. . . . Then came the food, from which the Impresario fed a little to the Hunger Artist during a faint-like half-sleep. . . .

His refusal to stop fasting is typical of the anorexic's obsessive insistence. The Hunger Artist is deeply disappointed at the forced break of his fast at the end of forty days: "Why did one want to rob him of the fame, to go on fasting, not only to become the greatest Hunger Artist of all times, which he probably already was, but also to surpass himself up to incomprehensibility, since he felt no limits to his capacity to fast."

The Hunger Artist's marginality is evident both in his being the object of a freak show and in his placement within a cage. The latter, with its suggestion of a subhuman existence, becomes even more pressing as the Hunger Artist's value as an attraction diminishes and he is forced to join a circus, his cage located at the entrance to the stables, where he is finally replaced by a panther. Yet the diminished attention of the public, which never understood him or his intent, is also what allows the Hunger Artist to pursue his goal of unlimited fasting. The Hunger Artist's absolute desire to refuse consumption is characterized best, in Gerhard Neumann's terms, as an "autarchic play of self-consumption": society ceases to matter as a force to resist or from which to draw attention and admiration. Ultimately, the Hunger Artist can be seen not as subhuman and monstrous, and also not as superhuman in his resistance to hunger, but rather simply as extrahuman. His attempt to place himself outside the boundaries of society is also an attempt to surpass even his own boundary—literally, because by starving he reduces his own body so that he actually seems to have disappeared into the straw lining the bottom of his cage. Consequently, and taking into consideration how the Hunger Artist in his uninterrupted fast becomes the sole audience for his art, Neumann concludes that the meaning brought about by such an "absolute sign," independent of any outside referent, is that of the "paradox of identity itself."