Complit 131 Brave New World
Shannon Roch
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins has become well-known for both its popularity among young adult readers, and its subsequent influence on the creation of dystopian young-adult franchises such as Divergent. Books in the young adult genre—particularly when they are, like this trilogy, paired with extreme popularity and with the sci-fi/fantasy genre—traditionally seem to be viewed by the general public as frivolous escapism, and thus are frequently overlooked by academics and literary critics as serious literature expressing concepts meaningful to the real world. However, the Hunger Games trilogy incorporates many grim elements common to dystopian literature, such as authoritarian governments and all that tends to accompany them—lack of freedom of speech, for example. The trilogy also includes themes of violence (including war, fear, and PTSD) as major themes in both the progression of the plot and the growth of the main characters. This paper will look at how the themes of dystopia and violence manifest themselves in the trilogy, and will argue that the trilogy actually explores socioeconomic, political, and psychological concepts much more mature than its critics would expect.
The Hunger Games trilogy is set in Panem, a future North America beset by environmental crises and rent by past war. Panem is governed by the wealthy, decadent Capitol in the Rocky Mountains, which survives on goods produced by the twelve working-class districts surrounding it. In punishment against the districts for a past rebellion, the Capitol forces each district to send one boy and one girl to participate in the Hunger Games, an annual event televised live throughout Panem, in which the children fight each other to the death. District children are selected for this purpose via a sort of grim lottery, called the reaping.
The dystopian elements of the series are obvious from the very first chapter of the first book in the trilogy, which opens with the heroine, Katniss, waking up on reaping day. As she goes about her daily activities and muses on the unfortunate reality of the reaping, the reader slowly gathers that Panem is a dystopian world. The most obvious dystopian element at this point, before the nature of the Hunger Games itself becomes fully revealed to the reader, is the lack of free speech. Katniss notes how she has “learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts. […] Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food shortages, or the Hunger Games” (The Hunger Games 7). It is not made obvious precisely how Katniss fears that incriminating speech could get back to the Capitol, but as Don Latham and Jonathan M. Hollister note in “The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in the Hunger Games Trilogy,” “clearly the fear of surveillance is a powerful means of social control through Panem,” even though it “is not clear how extensively surveillance is actually used” (Latham 40). The fear of even the possibility of rebellious comments being recorded is enough to curb any such discussion.
What is clear is that this is not a world where free speech is valued or even possible, but instead a place where citizen dissent has serious ramifications. The threat comes not only from the government, but also from other citizens, who may use their familiarity and knowledge of others’ actions to exploit them, as evidenced by Katniss’s description of those who take bets on whose names will be drawn for the reaping. “Odds are given on their ages, whether they’re Seam or merchant, if they will break down and weep. Most refuse dealing with the racketeers but carefully, carefully. These same people tend to be informers, and who hasn’t broken the law?” (The Hunger Games 20). Needless to say, this makes District 12 a place of distrust not only toward the Capitol, but also toward one’s fellow citizens.
Another element making Katniss’s world dystopian becomes obvious in the first chapter: class differences. Katniss lives in the Seam, the poorest part of District 12, as does her closest friend Gale. The people of the Seam are less fortunate than other people of District 12, living in such extreme poverty that emaciated bodies and death from starvation are not at all uncommon. But aside from these disadvantages, the poverty of people in the Seam also forces them to put themselves at much higher risk of being reaped for the Hunger Games. Katniss describes how, at the age of twelve (the same age at which they become eligible for the Games), District 12 children may “opt to add [their] names more times [to the reaping bowl] in exchange for tesserae. Each tessera is worth a meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person” (The Hunger Games 15). The necessity of providing for both oneself and one’s family every year means that, at the age of sixteen, Katniss’s name appears in the reaping ball twenty times, and eighteen-year-old Gale’s name appears a whopping forty-two times.
Clearly, both Katniss and Gale are at much higher risk of being selected for the Hunger Games than Madge, the mayor’s daughter, who seems to come from the merchant class and “has never been at risk of needing a tessera” (The Hunger Games 16). As evidenced by Gale’s anger toward Madge when she happens to meet him and Katniss on reaping day, these differences sow further discord and mistrust between the citizens of District 12, this time along class lines. Of course, Katniss quickly learns that their assumptions about the risk of being reaped are a bit misplaced—as evidenced by the reaping of both Prim, whose name was entered only once, and of Peeta, who is a baker’s son from the merchant class, and therefore has probably never needed tesserae. Much later, Katniss also learns that Madge’s aunt was herself a tribute, one who died while partnered with Seam-born victor Haymitch.
Class differences also lead to more generalized friction between the classes in District 12. In fact, as Joe Tompkins argues in his article “The Making of a Contradictory Franchise: Revolutionary Melodrama and Cynicism in The Hunger Games,” that these class differences dovetail nicely with the Capitol’s desire to keep the different classes (and the different districts) from feeling too unified, due to their differences, since “These circumstances [of poorer families taking more tesserae] underscore the class divide that propels the competition, and they disclose a world where ‘pitting every district against the others’ is a way of maintaining class structure” (Tompkins 74). As the people of the Seam look down on the merchant class for their supposedly soft lives, the merchants look down on the people of the Seam for no apparent reason than their poverty. In remembering the desperate days of starvation after her father died, Katniss describes how when she checked the Mellarks’ trash bin for food, Peeta’s mother started screaming at her, “telling me to move on and did I want her to call the Peacekeepers and how sick she was of having those brats from the Seam pawing through her trash. The words were ugly and I had no defense” (The Hunger Games 36).
It is worth noting that, although race or appearance itself seems to have little meaning in Panem, it is frequently noted how the merchant class and the people of the Seam look quite different, to the point where Katniss’s blond and blue-eyed mother (from the merchant class) and sister “look out of place” (The Hunger Games 9) in the Seam. By contrast, Katniss resembles her Seam-born father, and like Gale has straight black hair, olive skin, and gray eyes. The mention of olive skin in particular suggests that the people of the Seam may be people of color. The connection between appearance and social discrimination is worth noting—not only in District 12 but also in District 11 (Rue’s and Thresh’s homeplace), an agricultural district seemingly set somewhere in the south, where many of the citizens are black-skinned and work in orchards of some sort in slavery-like conditions. District 11’s description in Catching Fire makes it clear that the residents of this district are far more severely oppressed than those of District 12:
We slow slightly and I think we might be coming in for another stop, when a fence rises up before us. Towering at least thirty-five feet in the air and topped with wicked coils of barbed wire, it makes ours back in District 12 look childish. My eyes quickly inspect the base, which is lined with enormous metal plates. There would be no burrowing under those, no escaping to hunt. Then I see the watchtowers, placed evenly apart, manned with armed guards, so out of place among the fields of wildflowers around them.
“That’s something different,” says Peeta.
Rue did give me the impression that the rules in District 11 were more harshly enforced. But I never imagined something like this. (Catching Fire, 67–68)
It is important to acknowledge, of course, that the social hierarchies traditionally ascribed to race and color in the real world may not necessarily apply in Collins’s world. Nevertheless, this description of almost concentration-camp-like conditions in a district populated by black people, laboring daily in what is essentially a plantation for their rich Capitol overlords, are hard to ignore. Notable, too, is the surprise of Katniss, who has previously seemed to assume that the poverty and famine experienced by her own (generally lighter-skinned) district is the height of misfortune, and only now realizes that she has actually been privileged to escape the additional misfortune of social oppression experienced by District 11 residents. In other words, Katniss has been privileged all her life (due, if not to her race, then to the region she grew up in), to the point where she has been totally ignorant of her own privilege.
Aside from poverty, the lack of free speech, and class/ethnic differences, the ultimate challenge faced by the people of Panem’s districts is the Hunger Games itself. While there are certainly many citizens who never get reaped, the risk is always there for residents of every district, in every class, while going through their teenage years. The annual spectacle of the Hunger Games, however unpleasant, is very much a part of district culture: Even someone who does not get selected themselves is likely familiar with watching people die on live television, starting from a very young age. This is an important part of the preparation for potential future tributes, as stated by Latham and Hollister, who note that it “seems likely that Katniss has already gained a well-developed ‘sense’ of the Games from watching previous Games year after year, something that is required of every citizen in Panem” (Latham 36). Some of the people whom viewers see die may well be people they know from their own districts, or even their own family members—while in the Games, Katniss is often motivated by the thought that Prim is probably watching her efforts to survive. Of course, the Hunger Games also forces contestants to sacrifice their own morality and humanity in order to survive, since all children must attempt to kill other children (one of which may even hail from the same district) in order to survive. This ties into the larger subject of war, violence, and PTSD, which will be discussed later in this paper.
Aside from the personal challenges faced by tributes to the Hunger Games, the Games are dystopian in the sense that they also serve the larger purpose of discouraging revolt against the Capitol, which arguably counts as an authoritarian government due to its surveillance and its brutal treatment of the districts. The story told at every District 12 reaping recounts the Dark Days, in which the thirteen districts revolted against the Capitol “which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens” (The Hunger Games 21). The Capitol’s retaliation led to the supposed obliteration of District 13 and the beginning of the Hunger Games: “The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws that guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games” (The Hunger Games 21). But Tompkins makes the case that the creation of the Hunger Games and the division it symbolizes between the Capitol and the districts can also be seen as an issue of class:
The ostensible purpose of the Games is ceremonial: to commemorate The Dark Days, an erstwhile rebellion wherein the poorer districts tried, and failed, to overthrow the Capitol, forcing the revolutionary vanguard underground in the seemingly abandoned District 13. But the Games’ true function is symbolic violence in the guise of entertainment, a ritualistic reminder of the sheer power of the Capitol and the futility of rebelling against it. In short, the Games exist to keep class conflict at bay, or, to paraphrase Guy Debord, to manifest a social relationship mediated by spectacle. (Tompkins 71)
In other words, the Hunger Games not only brings peace (in a sense) and provides entertainment, but also provides a framework for reinforcing class differences between the Capitol and the districts. What the reaping day’s history lesson does not mention, of course, is that the Capitol lifestyle is one of massive excess and comfort, and that most of the people of the districts do come from a drastically different socioeconomic class, being essentially impoverished slaves who spend their lives working to support their hedonistic Capitol masters. Hence, it seems highly likely that this framing of the Hunger Games as a just punishment against ungrateful districts is Capitol propaganda, and that the Hunger Games were instead created to discourage future revolts by demoralizing the Districts and making union between the Districts unlikely. Katniss seems cognizant of the fact that the first of those goals—demoralization—is inherent in the Hunger Games, noting that the “real message is clear. ‘Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen’” (The Hunger Games 22).
But it is not until Katniss is actually in the Games that she seems to get the first inkling of how the Hunger Games are actually used to divide the Districts. The fact that flow of information between districts is banned seems to be a given, considering Katniss’s thoughts when she discusses life in District 13 with Rue. “It’s interesting, hearing about her life,” Katniss notes. “We have so little communication with anyone outside our district. In fact, I wonder if the Gamemakers are blocking out our conversation, because even though the information seems harmless, they don’t want people in different districts to know about one another” (The Hunger Games 246). This is in itself notable as a dystopian element, as it is part of Panem’s “strict control of information and misinformation” (Latham 37) by which the Capitol “tightly controls information in an effort to discourage resistance as much as possible, particularly any kind of widespread resistance” (Latham 37).
But while partnering with Rue is not unusual—temporary partnerships form all the time in the arena—Katniss’s unusual refusal to see Rue as an enemy, and her insistence on mourning her death, make clear that the animosity the Games typically arouses in rival districts is essentially an anti-revolt measure. After all, if Katniss had done the more typical thing and killed Rue, the people of District 11 would probably have hated her, and by extension would have hated District 12, making union between the districts difficult. Instead, Katniss covers Rue in flowers and sings to her, wanting to “do something, right here, right now, to shame them, to make them accountable, to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can’t own” (The Hunger Games 286). In doing so, she unwittingly invites sympathy from the people of District 11, who send her a gift of bread, and also commits her first act of rebellion against the Capitol, although she does not really seem to realize this until she watches the replay of her Games and notes that the act of covering Rue in flowers has been censored, since “even that smacks of rebellion” (The Hunger Games 440). Much later, in Catching Fire, the sheer sight of victors from different districts holding hands in unity is enough to cause a media blackout.
Aside from pitting the districts against each other and thereby discouraging rebellion, the yearly Hunger Games also, of course, involve violence and death. As noted, this has a powerful impact not only on the people of various districts who watch their own people kill and be killed, but also on the victors. It must be remembered that the violence visited on the tributes is not only perpetrated by other tributes (who could themselves be seen as “a piece in [the Capitol’s] Games” (The Hunger Games 172), but also by the Capitol through other threats in the arena. In Katniss’s first Games there are several examples of environmental threats—fireballs, tracker jacker wasps, and a body of water that dries up—most of which are merely meant to drive the tributes closer together for the sake of drama. The Games are, after all, being broadcast on live television and serve not only as oppression of the districts, but also as the “circuses” that keep the people of the Capitol safely entertained. But the final environmental threat instigated by the Capitol in Katniss’s first games are the muttations, which seem specifically designed to serve not only as a physical threat but a psychological one. This could be seen as the Capitol’s way of terrorizing the three remaining tributes—at least one of whom will certainly become a victor and thereby will have “slipped the noose of poverty that strangles the rest of us” and become an “embodiment of hope where there is no hope” (both Catching Fire 212)—and reminding them that all tributes are still the Capitol’s dogs, collared and lacking their own agency.
Katniss’s first Games are only the first of the trilogy’s many instances of violence and killing. On her post-Games Victory Tour, Katniss witnesses the civil unrest in the districts which she has unwittingly instigated through her celebration of Rue and her romance with Peeta (which culminated in their particularly provocative suicide pact with the berries). The most poignant of these is in District 11, where displaying the three-fingered salute and Rue’s mockingjay call lead to the Peacekeepers putting a bullet through an old man’s head. Aside from being an obvious act of violence, this serves as more psychological warfare against the victors, particularly Katniss, whom President Snow sees as the one to blame for the unrest and who consequently has more guilt over the violence. Though Katniss has obviously been affected by her experiences in the Games since they ended, it is the Capitol’s retaliation that really seems to cause her to be wracked by symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is on the Victory Tour that Katniss’s nightmares increase to the point that she wakes up screaming in spite of taking sleeping pills.
It is not until the revolution is well underway that Katniss fully realizes just how strong the Capitol’s hold has always been over the victors—while her actions make her particularly prone to arousing the Capitol’s ire, the Capitol has never been particularly kind to those who win the Games. Johanna, unlike Katniss, is untroubled by jabberjays mimicking the sounds of tortured loved ones because, as she says, “They can’t hurt me. I’m not like the rest of you. There’s no one left I love” (Catching Fire 418), which may suggest that any loved ones from her own district were murdered by the Capitol after Johanna became a victor. This may seem like a far-fetched inference to make until one considers the backgrounds of Finnick, who was blackmailed into prostitution out of a desire to protect his loved ones, and Haymitch, whose family was killed because he, like Katniss, made the Capitol feel threatened by the unconventional way he won his Games. In fact, the only relevant difference between Haymitch’s and Katniss’s actions in the Games were that Katniss’s actions not only defied the Capitol but actually incited revolt, whereas Haymitch’s did not.
After the decimation of District 12 and Katniss’s escape to District 13, the psychological warfare of the Capitol continues to serve as a weapon against the victors, particularly Katniss, and by extension against the rebellion. This could actually be said to have started at the beginning of Katniss’s second Games when Cinna was beaten up in front of her, but its frequency and severity takes a sharp uptick in Mockingjay. Conditioned by a life spent carefully attempting to avoid aggravating the Capitol in any way, Katniss feels guilt when she visits the remains of District 12, blasted after her escape from the arena, and sees bodies “reeking in various states of decomposition, carrion for scavengers, blanketed by flies. I killed you, I think as I pass a pile. And you. And you” (Mockingjay 6). The Capitol’s torturing of Peeta also serves as long-distance warfare against Katniss with which they attempt to cripple not only him but also her. The roses that Katniss associates with President Snow serve as psychological warfare on several occasions, including the discovery of the roses in District 12 and the hideous rose-scented muttations in the sewer that call Katniss by name. Of course, there are also many more general instances of PTSD to be found in the other tributes, such as Johanna’s fear of water and Annie’s mental illness.
Finally, it could be argued that the effects of war, mistrust, and PTSD start to turn the supposed heroes of the trilogy, and Katniss in particular, into anti-heroes who bring about realities just as dystopian as the ones they are fighting against. On a wider scale, the anti-hero concept can be seen in District 13, which uses Katniss as a tool just as heartlessly as the Capitol did, and where President Coin seems poised to become just as much of a dictator as President Snow—to the point where Katniss chooses to shoot her rather than Snow. On a more personal level, Katniss in her child-soldier role seems to have become equally heartless, having transformed into more of a killing machine than she ever was in her first games, killing an unarmed Capitol citizen and shortly thereafter mowing down countless people in the Capitol streets. “Peacekeeper, rebel, citizen, who knows?” she says. “Everything that moves is a target” (Mockingjay 398). This is very different from the Games—where Katniss knew who she was killing, did so for her own survival (and Rue’s or Peeta’s), and frequently felt empathy for her victims.
Toward the end of the trilogy, however, Katniss seems to have a growing awareness of the pointlessness and evil of the violence she is both experiencing and inflicting, and again starts to feel, if not exactly empathy, then at least a weary discomfort with war. The key to unlocking this emotion is realizing that her own actions, and Coin’s actions, are endangering the lives of children just as much as President Snow ever did. Before Coin even proposes her own Hunger Games, Katniss feels deeply uneasy about the death of the Capitol girl in the lemon-yellow coat (Mockingjay 397) and the District 13-instigated attack of the children serving as a human shield for the President’s mansion, which results in Prim’s death. The latter incident is a particularly poignant example of the sort of anti-heroism of war at this point in the story, since it seems likely Gale played a role in devising this trap.
In conclusion, the world of Panem contains a number of elements that make the Hunger Games trilogy a classic, chilling example of dystopia. Many of the themes are ones familiar to readers of dystopia—authoritarian governments and surveillance, for example—but the Hunger Games trilogy has a particularly modern resonance with its use of themes such as class/racial friction, the use of media to manipulate viewpoints and simultaneously entertain/control the masses, oppression of the lower socioeconomic tiers, and the ensuing rage and desire for a revolution of the social order. The presence of such elements is especially poignant when one considers that the trilogy is supposedly intended for children and, as such, is frequently seen as just a frivolous mainstream franchise. On the contrary, it could instead be argued that the mature nature of many of the themes touched upon in the trilogy mean it deserves to be taken more serious in literary circles as a work of dystopian literature.
Works Cited
Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire. Scholastic, 2009.
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic, 2008.
Collins, Suzanne. Mockingjay. Scholastic, 2010.
Latham, Don and Jonathan Hollister. “The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in the Hunger Games.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 45, issue 1, Mar. 2014. 33–146. Web. Retrieved 9 Nov. 2020.
Tompkins, Joe. “The Makings of a Contradictory Franchise: Revolutionary Melodrama and Cynicism in the Hunger Games.” Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, vol. 58, issue 1, Oct. 2018. 70–90. Web. Retrieved 9 Nov. 2020.
