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Plot

The story opens with a description of an old-fashioned hunger or fasting-artist, who spends his time on public display, a caged spectacle starving for a cause or for art. He lives his life there, with ribs protruding, allowing young children to look, poke, and fear his awe, strength, and courage. However, there has been a large decline in these fasting-artists in recent decades. The fasting-artists used to persist in a cage lined with straw, watched over by volunteers selected by the public, typically local butchers. The artist disdains those 'watchers' who do not pay close attention to him and believe that they are giving him opportunity to sneak eatables from a secret cache. He sings to them to dispel any notions that he has any food, yet his fast-induced suspicions cause him to believe the inattentive watchers think he is, artfully, eating and singing simultaneously. The artist prefers those who watch him up close under the scrutiny of the torchlights provided to the volunteers, to whom he tells his nomadic life-story, and discusses his special ability of fasting and the ease with which he does it.

When the spectacle is brought to full effect, after forty days of fasting, the artist is brought to a ring in which crowds of people - especially women - pay to watch him. Eventually, two young women lead him out of his cage to a meager meal, followed by an orchestrated collapse by the artist's manager, an impresario, at which the designated ladies burst into tears, adding to the drama for the crowd's pleasure. However, why would he accept food after such a long fast when he can make it longer? Eventually, the manager spoonfeeds the fasting-artist, after he had reached his forty days, and the crowd cheers and disperses. In what seems like a flick of the switch, there is no longer a desire, no audience for fast-staging in the towns and cities of Europe.

The artist leaves his manager and is downgraded to a traveling circus attraction, where he believes, in vain, that he can return to the limelight by fasting for an impossible length of time. The lack of interest in fasting prompts the circus manager to put his cage in a corner, where crowds pass by, only interested in seeing the menagerie beyond his cage. At the circus the hunger artist continues the fast far beyond his previous forty-day record, but no one pays him or his record any attention. Even he forgets how long he has fasted. Finally, the manager walks by the neglected cage and only sees a heap of dirty straw in a perfectly good cage; after a few moments, he and his men realize the hunger artist is still there. At the same time, the hunger artist is near death; he whispers his last words in the manager's ear and is unceremoniously buried, straw and all, by circus attendants. The cage is then occupied by an attractive and lively panther, who struts and cries out to the delight of onlookers, all of whom have forgotten the cage's previous occupant.^[1]