Hope of Death as the Possibility of Life: A Psychosemiotic Reading of Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist as the Narrative of Existence into Non Being

This study of The Hunger Artist explores how signs and symbols play a significant role in bringing the structured imagination of Kafka’s psyche and signification process on the surface of the narrative. As various signs encode different representations of experiences and the source of these representations is not only the subconscious and unconscious selves of the author and reader but also the communicative and linguistic context within which the experience is embedded. These entrenched sign complexes help to appreciate the indepth dimensions of the meanings of the narrative by positioning it in a multidimensional theoretical framework of psychosemiotics. The underlined proposal of sign experience synchronizes with Freudian dream theory and spotlights the psychic structure of id, ego and superego manifested in the text at discourse level. This explicit display of the narrative within the particular perspective of the interpretation of signs and symbols has been argued in the light of theoretical assumptions of Sonne & Grambye’s (2006) model at discourse level corresponding to id, ego and superego for the purpose of this study. The underpinning logic of this study is to investigate The Hunger Artist as a discourse through a dialectical exploration to lay bare the conceptual contrasts and parallels portrayed in the form of inveterating and recurring significatory units to crystallize psychosemiotic theoretical configuration.