This is a beautiful story by Kafka. He writes that there is a circus with different types of performers and any variety of games and acrobatics and entertainments. The owner of the circus has engaged among the troupe of performers a person who is adept in fasting. This man presents his shows on fasting, and he has a hut to himself. People visit the circus to watch many things – like feats of trained animals, strange and wild animals – and they also come to watch this fasting man,
who is an object of great attraction. He can live without food for months. Once he went without food for a full three months at a stretch. So people come to watch him too. But there is a limit to it. It happens that in a certain town the circus tarries on for six or seven months.
Spectators come to watch the man on his fast for a fortnight or a month, but then their interest wears away. That is why
it is said that showmen and saints should regularly change their places. If they stay in one place for long, they will be in difficulty. How long will people stand them? So it is fitting that they go from one town to another after every two or three days. When they visit a new town, people flock to them again. In another town they are again very entertaining.
The circus stays too long in that town, and as a result visitors stop coming to the fasting performer. They forget his hut completely. And the man is so emaciated through long fasting that he cannot go to the manager and inform him about his situation. He is so weak that he cannot even rise from his bed, so he keeps on lying and lying there. And as the circus is very big, he is actually forgotten.
After a lapse of four or five months someone suddenly remembers him one fine morning and makes inquiries about him. Now the manager becomes anxious, lest the fasting man might be dead. He rushes to his hut, but is pained to find no one there except the bundle of hay on which he lay. There is no trace of the man himself. When the manager calls out his name, there is no answer from him.
He is so worn out that he cannot speak. Then the manager removes the grass bed and he is aghast to see the fasting man reduced to a bare skeleton. But his eyes are safe and alive.
The manager says to him, ”My friend, I sincerely apologize for forgetting you, but are not you equally crazy? If people had ceased to visit you, you should have resumed eating.” The man replies, ”But now my habit of eating is dead; it is finished. I don’t feel hungry at all. And I am no longer a performer; I am trapped in the performance itself; I am a helpless prisoner in its hands. I am no longer play-acting, but really don’t have any hunger. In fact, now I don’t know what hunger is, because what they call hunger no longer happens to me.
