it's Quite Simple 

Upon reading ‘At The Appetite-Cure’, I giggled along with Mark Twain in his satirical differentiation between appetite and starvation. This classic short story withstands the test of time by poking fun at a universal action of eating. It not only is a commonality of humanity but also links generations up to and beyond today’s time. In the telling of hunger on two separate occasions, Twain suggests that we have become removed from our natural beings so much, that we are devoid of common sense. His work is easily receptive to the young adult audience, relevant to current issues, and is able to provokes thought into our perceptions versus their actualities.

The first portion of the story, told by the patient, indicates to the reader that this piece is not a truthfully a review of an institution, but actually serves as a satire.  Twain is not aiming to put his reader to sleep with big words or analysis, but rather, his humor is sensed straight off the bat in the first paragraph when he introduces Hochberghaus. He merely states its location in Bohemia and then proceeds onward in a long ramble about Vienna’s beer after the second sentence. This quick switch indicates the distracted manner in which the patient is writing and therefore, leads the reader to question his interest and value in writing about the health spa. Also, within this switch is where Twain first uses, as he does many times throughout the story, sharp sarcasm when he explains the local’s ‘self-sacrifice’ of beer drinking in comparison to the area’s health spa healing waters. In the next paragraph he calls his discovery of such a “heaven of self-sanctifiers” as “a mere passing note of gratitude for blessings received.”  This establishes the lackadaisical and colloquial manner in which Twain wishes to speak to the reader with. If the patient’s intent was a formal review, he would have removed the first paragraph of nonchalant thought.  This also directs readers to pay close attention to his words because they sometimes have more than just a literal meaning.  He persists onward through his thoughts with an even sharper sarcasm, when describing the close proximity of health spas and transportation systems with his phrases “you can stand in Vienna and toss a biscuit into Kaltenleutgeben with a twelve inch gun” and, “you can go by phenomenally slow trains.” If these statements don’t catch the reader’s attention then surely the name Haimberger will. Thus, his tone of voice is especially familiar to the young adults today being that sarcasm is a fluent feature of the teenage tongue.  Twain formats both sections of the story in this dialectic manner to provide a more interesting read on what could be considered a philosophical discussion.

           

The focus on loss of appetite as a disease/crisis in life can be analyzed on many levels making this piece additionally applicable to present matters. We can take appetite as in its literal definition of longing food or we can take it as a way to express simply a yearning for something in our lives. Not only can we play with the definition of appetite, we can also expand it to fit a wide range of eating problems. We can narrow the scope of interest to correlate the story with meal plan entrapments of University students or broadly expand it into areas such as obesity and dieting debates. All in all, it is in our incessant regularity of life that we take for granted what we have and lose sight of common sense. It seems an obvious and natural statement, “Don't eat until you are hungry,” but is it? Mark Twain addresses this question as follows:

“As regards his health--and the rest of the things--the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.”

This excerpt is not only the main nudge to Twain’s purpose for writing this story, but it also leaves the reader pondering the so called ‘complexity’ of our world’s issues. We take into account that it was not necessary for the patient to travel all the way to Bohemia to be ‘cured’ of an appetite.  This is confirmed in the second portion of the story within the conversation with the professor that the cure process is ‘quite simple’ only consisting of ‘covert starvation.’ This implies that the cure was merely common sense and didn’t need to be made so complicated.  Just as we can say the oil crisis could easily be solved by simply banning the use of oil. This solution scrutiny can be dually applied to say that problems leave plenty of room to exploit. The entire Appetite Anstallt operation seems to be simply a way to make profit and is very real in our world today. Just look at the story of the plastic water bottle. Soft drink companies realized that there would be a cap of how much soda they sold and therefore, they fashioned the ‘problem’ of dirty tap water as a scare tactic. People thought of bottled water just as we might think of someone trying to sell a container of air.  It now had a problem defined value created purely on the basis of market.

           

There is no doubt that Twain’s short Story is highly applicable and valuable to the world of today. It is not only decidedly entertaining and relatable to the college student; it also embodies that college mentality that we can solve our world’s problems. By recognizing regularity, tearing apart solution convolutions and removing ourselves from economic exploitations, it’s ‘quite simple’.