comparison of "a hunger artist" and "a very old man with enormous wings"

comparison of "a hunger artist" and "a very old man with enormous wings"

Comparative Analysis Essay
The two short stories “A Hunger Artist” and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” are very similar in many aspects. The theme, characters, and conflicts of those characters are all very closely interrelated. By examining these aspects of the stories, we can begin to compare the hunger artist to the old man and see how closely related the stories are to each other.    
Both the hunger artist and the old man are very comparable in the two stories. Both of them are always very dirty and are thought of as below human standard. They are not seen in the same light as a person would look upon another person, they are seen as more alien than human. Another thing the two have in common is that someone is always watching them. The hunger artist’s lifestyle is dependent upon people watching him, while the old man is just unfortunate enough to have been put in a cage, by someone desperate for attention and money, for everyone to see. In both stories once again we see the same things happening to the characters due to the fact that people leave and stop watching them after they become bored. This happens for the hunger artist when people no longer find him interesting and start watching the animals instead, and for the old man it is caused by the arrival of the girl-spider who people become amazed by, just like they used to be amazed by him. The major difference between the two is the fact that the hunger artist enjoys an audience while the old man could care less who’s watching him.

The main themes of the short stories are very closely related in many ways. The main theme of “A Hunger Artist” is the hunger artist’s need for audience. The hunger artist eventually dies because of the lack of an audience. He feels that his purpose in life is to show people someone fasting and show off his ability to ignore hunger, this in turn shows humanities desire to see something suffer. They do not care about his fasting; they only care...