Short Stories of Marquez and Kafka

This study will provide a comparative analysis of two short stories, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" and Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist." The study will be grounded in the most basic similarity--both Marquez's angel and Kafka's hunger artist are entirely misunderstood by the world--and the most basic difference--the thoughts of the angel are completely unknown to the reader, while the thoughts of the hunger artist are spelled out clearly.

Despite the latter point, however, the two characters are equally mysterious. Kafka reveals much of the thought process of the hunger artist, and even appears to explain the source of the character's compulsion, but in the end both the angel and the hunger artist remain mysteries both to the worlds in which they dwell and to the reader.

Other similarities and differences flow from this basic root of mystery: both are in a cage of sorts, though the hunger artist is free to leave when he wishes, and the angel is at the end of his tale free to wander about as well; food is of little significance to both characters, though it is of great importance to those around them; both create great interest in others, and then that interest fades away; and, finally, both leave this world as mysterious as ever, with the angel flying away and the hunger artist dying of his art.

The angel is seen at first as a threat. The most plausible explanation of his arrival is that he has come to take away the sick and apparently dyi

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"The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act" (Marquez 527). The angel seems to remain there only because he is captive, and, later, because he is waiting for his wings to grow back so he can fly away, as he finally does. He seems to perform a number of odd miracles, such as growing three new teeth in the mouth of a man who came to him to be cured of his blindness. Even when he no longer stays in his chicken coop, the angel continues to show no inclination to communicate or to even care about himself or others. Instead, he "went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man" (Marquez 529). The hunger artist, on the other hand, is almost desperate to communicate with the public, to explain his quest, and to receive from them the honor and the due he believes are rightly his as the greatest hunger artist in the world. The hunger artist seems to take a special interest in children and their positive response to him. He finds hope for the future of professional fasting in the fact that children seem to understand the significance of fasting on some level beyond adult cynicism. This is an important difference between the public responses to the angel and to the hunger artist, at least insofar as those

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