"A Hunger Artist" is told retrospectively through third-person narration. The narrator looks back several decades from "today" to a time when the public marveled at the professional hunger artist and then depicts the waning interest in such displays. The story begins with a general description of "the hunger artist" before narrowing in on a single performer, the protagonist.
The hunger artist traveled around performing for curious spectators. He would sit in a cage empty of anything except for a clock and some straw, always attended by rotating teams of watchers selected by the public (usually three butchers) to ensure he was not secretly eating. Despite such precautions, many, including some of the watchers themselves, were convinced the hunger artist cheated. Such suspicions annoyed the hunger artist, as did the forty-day limit imposed on his fasting by his promoter, or "impresario". The impresario insisted that, after forty days, public interest in the hunger artist inevitably declined, but the hunger artist found the time limit irksome and arbitrary, as it prevented him from bettering his own record and fasting indefinitely. At the end of a fast, the hunger artist, amid highly theatrical fanfare, would be carried from his cage and made to eat, both of which he always resented. These performances, followed by intervals of recuperation, were repeated for many years.
Despite his fame, the hunger artist felt dissatisfied and misunderstood. If a spectator, observing his apparent melancholy, tried to console him, he would erupt in fury, shaking the bars of his cage. The impresario would punish such outbursts by apologizing to the audience, pointing out that irritability was a consequence of fasting, and then trying to refute the hunger artist's boast that he could fast much longer than he was allowed by showing photographs (which were also for sale) of the hunger artist near death at the end of a previous fast. In this way, the impresario suggested the hunger artist's sadness and poor physique was caused by fasting, when, in the hunger artist's view, he was depressed because of the premature cessation of his fasts. The impresario's "perversion of the truth" further exasperated the hunger artist.
Seemingly overnight, popular tastes changed and public fasting went out of fashion. The hunger artist broke his ties with the impresario and hired himself to a circus, where he hoped to perform truly prodigious feats of fasting. No longer a main attraction, he was given a cage on the outskirts of the circus, near the animal cages. Although the site was readily accessible and crowds thronged past during intermissions in the circus show, few paid any attention to the hunger artist, partly because any spectators who stopped to look at him would create an obstruction in the flow of people on their way to see the animals. The hunger artist initially looked forward to the intermissions, but over time he came to dread them because they only meant there would be noise and disruption and a reminder that his days in the sun were gone. He felt oppressed by the sights, sounds, and smells of the animals, but he didn't dare complain for fear of drawing attention to the fact that he was more of an annoyance than an attraction.
Eventually, the hunger artist came to be completely ignored by the public, so much so that no one, not even the artist himself, counted the days of his fast. One day, an overseer noticed what looked like an empty cage and wondered why it was unused. He and some attendants poked around in the dirty straw and found the hunger artist, near death. Before he died, he asked forgiveness and confessed that he should not be admired, since the reason he fasted was simply that he could not find food to his liking. The hunger artist was buried with the straw from his cage and replaced by a panther. Spectators crowded about the panther's cage because the panther, who was always brought the food he liked, took so much joy in life.
