SOURCE: "Hunger Artist or Artist in Hungering: Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist'," in Criticism, Vol. IV, No. 1, Winter, 1962, pp. 28-43.

In the following excerpt, Steinhauer interprets "A Hunger Artist" as a religious allegory depicting "the tragedy . . . of ascetic idealism." This interpretation, he claims, "fits the text in every detail, naturally, without stretching the correspondence between symbol and thing symbolized, and it is the only one that does so. "

Since the first wave of Kafka criticism washed over us in the thirties there has been a rising tide of interpretations of Kafka's work: theological, sociological, existentialist, ethnic, psychoanalytic, even medical. A reaction against this proliferation of readings was bound to set in; so it has become fashionable of late to decry all these abstract-learned interpretations and to argue that, since Kafka was not a philosopher but a creative artist, any attempt to derive a "philosophy" from his work is to...