Structural Analysis of “Kafka’s The Hunger Artist and Jacob’s The Monkey’s Paw through Poe’s Unity Effect”

Abstract

The paper compared and analyzed the structure and techniques utilized by the different authors of two short stories: “The Monkey’s Paw” 1902 by W W. Jacob and “The Hunger Artis” 1922 by Franz Kafka through Poe’s Unity of effect perusal. One of the stories is English, which also falls into the category of Horror with human elements, “The Monkey’s Paw” and the other is existentialism through magical realism, The Hunger Artist in the German language. The method used in the study is known as genre analysis of the structure of any literary work through selecting the different elements such as plots, style, conflict, point of view, and other figures of speech.  The study recapitulated that both stories consisted of short story’s pure elements contributing to meaningfulness, aesthetic sense, and appeals to their readers. In terms of structure, The Monkey’s Paw is more lively and engaging through dialogues while The Hunger Artist drives its readers through the descriptive and surprising expressions. The study employed both textual and genre analysis with the help of available literary criticism and definitions to expand the horizon of the short story.