What the exam asks
In Paper 2, you write a closed-book comparative essay on two literary works in 1 hour 45 minutes (25 marks). Because a short-story collection counts as a single “work”, discussing two or three stories from the collection demonstrates thorough knowledge and interpretation (Criterion A, 5 marks) and gives you a wider range of authorial choices to evaluate (Criterion B1, 5 marks). These three short pieces pair cleanly with questions on outsiders, confinement, public versus private identity, power, or how endings reshape meaning.
Core ideas
1. A Hunger Artist (1922): the spectacle of self-starvation
- Retrospective, impersonal narration: The story opens in the voice of a cultural historian looking back on professional fasting as a vanished public entertainment. This cool, matter-of-fact register sounds like an obituary for an entire profession before we even meet the protagonist.
- The cage, the watchers and the forty-day limit: The artist sits on straw inside a small barred cage beside a clock. Permanent watchers—usually three local butchers—stare at him to ensure he does not eat in secret. What torments the artist is not hunger, which he privately thinks is “the easiest thing in the world” (trans. Ian Johnston), but the public’s suspicion that he cheats. His impresario enforces a strict commercial limit: “forty days was the maximum length of time” (Johnston) a town’s curiosity could be sustained. By turning the biblical forty days (Moses on the mountain, Jesus fasting in the wilderness) into a marketing deadline, Kafka satirizes how the modern market turns spiritual asceticism into a timed variety act. At forty days, a band plays, doctors measure him, and two young ladies chosen by lot help him out just when he wants to keep going.
- Decline, confession and the panther: When public taste abandons fasting, the artist joins a large circus and his cage is placed outside near the stables, merely an obstacle on the crowd’s way to the menagerie. The noticeboards fade, the day-count stops, and he is forgotten in the rotting straw. Found dying by a supervisor who wonders why a good cage is sitting unused, he whispers his final confession, is buried with the straw, and is replaced by “a young panther” (Johnston)—a sleek, well-fed body whose vitality holds the spectators thronging round the bars.
- Interpretations: Critics read the story as a parable of the modern artist misunderstood by a commercial audience, as a critique of pride disguised as spiritual purity, or biographically (Kafka was dying of tuberculosis and struggling to swallow when he corrected the proofs in 1924, though the story stands independently of his biography).