The Hunger Games, dystopia, and watching people hurt each other
I almost quit The Hunger Games at chapter 3 — not because it’s bad — it’s exceptional, but for the same reason I still haven’t seen Schindler’s List. Why would I want to read a story about 24 children thrown into a ring to murder each other for the pleasure of others? I certainly wouldn’t watch a snuff film, why fill my head with this?
Don’t misunderstand me — It’s precisely because I get it. I see that people have equal capacities for cruelty and love; that both extremes shine brighter in opposition to each other, and that the continuing miracle of our daily existence is that, given our natures, we are not all slaves.
However … last week, before I put the book down, I came across this in another book I’m reading, and forgetting for a moment my own plans to quit THG, I posted it to Facebook:
[If a dogmatic reader] restricts his approbation to works [he agrees with], he will probably find himself subsisting on a very poverty-stricken literary diet. … [he] will not be submitting his beliefs to the test of imaginative experience. In literature, ideas leave their cloisters and descend into the dust and heat to prove their virtue anew.
‘Brooks, Warren: Understanding Fiction
Understanding this, I decided not look away, and I finished The Hunger Games with memories of Lord of the Flies, 1984, and The Long Walk — which must be a close relation to, if not an inspiration for it.
A couple days later I came across “The Lottery” in a collection I’m reading. In this short story, a group of villagers: men, women and children, draw lots to see who will be stoned to death by everyone else as a sacrifice for a good planting season.
Unable to escape these themes, I’ve been thinking about the way we blithely sacrifice strangers to preserve our own rituals and comforts — how these stories occur every day.
How might the districts in The Hunger Games correspond to third world manufacturing countries and poor Chinese provinces?
In our own communities, what individuals are alienated and persecuted in the name of ancient superstition because random chance has singled them out to be different from the herd?
Reading The Hunger Games, it’s easy to hate the sadistic audience that craves the violence of young people destroying each other — but isn’t that The Jersey Shore, and are we not that audience?
All of these thoughts answer my question “why read this?” They remind me that it’s important to be disturbed, challenged, and uncomfortable. They remind me that if we have the courage to test our ideas instead of protecting them, they can either break altogether (which is merciful and grand when it happens), or they can emerge stronger and more informed.
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Goodreads review
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As a writer, this book humbled me. It’s powerful, clean, simple, and sharp. It’s disturbing in important ways, and the plot is handled expertly. The story construction is clever and unpredictable for the most part, and the telling has a kind of simple, elemental quality that I like. There are no superfluous details (no sun-warmed flagstones) but there is water and trees and fire and cold, and all serve the story. Highly recommended.
How is the Hunger Games a dystopia?
The action takes place in a dystopian world, and it has themes that are commonly associated with these kinds of stories. In contrast to a utopia, which is a fictional idea of a perfect future world, a dystopia is a fictional idea of a future world gone wrong. Widespread poverty and hunger, devastated cities, and an oppressive, centralized government that uses invasive, creative brutality against its slavish citizens are all marks of a dystopia. You can find these things in other famous dystopias like 1984 and the Matrix movies.
These stories also serve as cautionary tales, and I hope I conveyed some of that in the post. In 1984, we see an audience watching a movie where people are dismembered and gunned down from helicopters — and the audience is loving it — just like the citizens in the capital in THG. We’re supposed to be disgusted, we’re supposed to ask whether the writer is really talking about us. In that way, dystopian works are somewhat like mirrors that can show us our own hypocrisy and the possible consequences of our own actions.