Kate Jaimet's Blog - Posts Tagged "hunger-games"

The Hunger Games -- dystopia, right? On the face of it, what could be more dystopian than a bunch of children forced to kill each other? But scratch the surface, and this book is more of a fairy-tale than a dystopia: the story of an unlikely hero who defies impossible odds to emerge unscathed from many trials.
Think of the classic dystopian novel, 1984. What makes it a dystopia is not just the authoritarian society, but the fact that the protagonist's rebellion against that society ultimately fails. Ultimately, Winston Smith betrays the woman he loves, breaks under torture, and lives on as a man whose soul is crushed. That, my friends,is dystopia. Dark, depressing, and unredeemed.
In The Hunger Games, by contrast, Katniss's soul is never crushed. Yes, she lies to Peeta about being in love with him, but that's about as bad as it gets. In the Hunger Games arena, the author cleverly works the plot so that Katniss never has to kill even one single sympathetic character. The only people she kills are the "Careers" -- who are utterly undeveloped as characters and demonized as enemies from the very get-go. (I actually found it quite disturbing how the author dehumanizes these characters, making the readers feel that it is 'okay' for Katniss to kill them, all the while remaining a sympathetic character.)
What if Katniss had been forced to kill Rue in order to come out of the arena alive? What if she had done it? Wouldn't that have made her a less sympathetic character? Wouldn't that have destroyed her soul?
Wouldn't that have been a true dystopia?