초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Franz Kafka’s works have attracted attention for a long time for their various points of view. Nonetheless, his environmental experiences and the related aspects of his works still need to be discussed. Kafka’s ideas of spatial representation resulted from his oftentimes lonely and isolated childhood. The trauma of an unhappy childhood seems to have had a powerful influence on his inner disposition and forming of his interpersonal relationships. The lack of attachment with his parents, especially with his mother, fostered an ambivalent attitude of himself as well as towards the people around him. It is expressed as the conflicting desires - to return to his mother or every type of womb, a place of security, and to reject her. The influence from his childhood environment permeate throughout Kafka’s Ein Hungerkunstler. First of all, the main character’s space is starkly opposed to the external world, and his perception of such ‘different’ spaces has clearly ambivalent characteristics. His space where absolute fast is made is a latticed pen and symbolizes his inner closing and some openness to the external world at the same time. Likewise, the place of death where he completes his most thorough fast has a double meaning. It seems that he finally finds perfect freedom out of all inner conflicts and external relations. However, his shabby body dumped carelessly in a humble hole in the ground and the last space remind us of all beings’ resignation to fate. Although fast is “the easiest thing in the world” for the fasting clown, it is not any more perfect ‘nature’ as long as it is ‘art’. By his most artistically ‘thorough fast’, it is rather like that he ‘perfectly eat’ to his fill in the Kafka’s way. After all, Kafka-style duplicity underlying the main character’s spatial experience or ‘self space’ is the attribute of all humans. Fate of the Kafka’s fasting artist is the fate of all limited, that is to say, limited to space, humans who connote life and death at the same time, and he may be a symbol of “a martyr” thoroughly going through such fatal spaces in place of all human beings.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Franz Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler, A Hunger Artist, Raumerfahrung, Spatial Experience, Prague, Kleine Fabel
