Stories: “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka.

Similarities between the both:

  • Both ended up in a cage and were treated terribly by the public. In Old Man with Enormous Wings, the neighborhood were tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t supernatural creature but a circus animal. In “A Hunger Artist” he was treated like as if he was a joke and a show, people bought season tickets just to see him.
  • Their both third person narration
  • Both have gothic emotion – cruelty and fear
  • Both stories ending was a return to normalcy – gothic central irony
  • There was a lot of gothic actions taking place in the stories – chaotic and being violent
  • Both focuses on external focalization

Differences between the both:

  • Old man with enormous wings is the fantastic
  • Hunger artist is uncanny
  • Hunger artist is an allegory and focuses on realism – only focused on fasting
  • Old man with enormous wings managed to escape and fly away when his feathers and wings started growing
  • Hunger artist died in the end because of fasting
  • Old man with enormous wings focuses on magical realism