>The hunger artist was not only too old to take up a different profession, but was fanatically devoted to fasting more than anything else.
This seems to me the self-insert of the artist, the meta moment, if you will. Ahab is likewise monomaniacal, an artist of life. But his disappointment with life is not with the fading adulation, but with his audience's construal of him. Nobody gets him the way he wants to be got.
>with his lips pursed as if for a kiss
>wetting his lips with water to prevent chafing
Pretty well crafted stuff, mang.
The Point of no Return, for the career. Vocation as identity, the passing away of interest, and the dying body. The hunger artist is killing himself which is the irony of his situation because it is the only thing he can do. The only conclusion of life is to control its respirations.
His artistry is, however, a ruse he uses to explain to others his simple distaste for food and the following of his natural inclinations.
The panther is the passing fashion, the trend elusively disappearing in the flux of history, while at the same time, the raw meat diet, the similar case of the few onlookers who had to look away because it was unpleasant for them to see a withered man; and the panther, whose animal enjoyment of the meat thrown to it is diametrically opposed to the hunger artist's ascesis. The difference: the awareness of the nature and purpose of the exhibit between the panther and the hunger artist.
People desert him close to death because they fear death, they want to be reminded of life overflowing, all the time. Their mortality is superstitiously avoided, which the hunger artist confronts them with.
The story tells a story about aesthetic development (reactions against previous innovations) as well as a change of regime in carny culture.
