I've been reading and talking about The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and have been pondering on its meaning and themes. I will not give a background or a plot summary, because this post is meant to specifically target those individuals who have already read the book and pondered its inner meaning. So, this post has a major spoiler alert.
Suzanne Collins to me is very brave person. She writes literature for kids that broaches on subjects and actions that parents try to shield children from. Whats more, she writes her books to get people to think, which is a hard and, well, dangerous thing to do.
I think that Suzanne Collins wrote those books the way she did as a sort of warning to our generation. It is full of mini-themes and messages about nature and censorship and such, but I think that the main themes of the book have to do with the humanity and how violence affects who we are and what we become.
Katniss at the beginning is used to having to fend and survive for herself, and doing things out of necessity. She has never had anything provided for her in her life, and has developed a system of "owing" people, where anytime someone does something for her, she must pay them back equally. This quality comes back to haunt her in the arena, where she hates owing people for saving her life, which is hard to pay back.
Now, in the first book, the Hunger Games sort of humanizes her. She is animal and automatic and kills because of necessity, but once she kills her first human, she realizes what it actually means to take a life. She realizes that every single person in that games is, in fact, a person. She finds that every thing has a right to live, and that the games are pure evil.
After that, though, her experiences start to overcome her. She becomes more and more monstrous in her automatic killing response when confronted with a threat. She stops thinking about those who she kills, and becomes more focused on her own survival and the survival of others around her. She stops caring about them. She becomes more and more removed from not only the people she kills, but the people she is close to as well.
If you compare the pre-Games Katniss to the Mockingjay Katniss, you think that maybe Katniss's disturbed twin came and killed her and replaced her. I mean, at the beginning, she is dark, automatic, and kind of isolated, but after, she is still those things, but they are blown way out of proportion. She is disturbed, insane, broken, and intensely isolated from the rest of the world. She hates everything, especially herself. She is in a crazed, horrid state.
So what does this show about our world? I think it clearly shows the effect of violence upon humanity in general. It shows that violence warps people and hurts them internally. This is a clear warning to us. We don't want to end up like Katniss. Cold, isolated, unresponsive. We need to make sure we make choices and perform actions that will bring peace and not violence. Sort of like Ghandi, who believed in non-violent protest.
I fear for the world today. Desensitization to violence is happening all around us through video games and the movies. We put off the idea of violence in other parts of the world. It has become a silly thing now that isn't real except in T.V. and on the PS3. What would happen, if we ended up in a situation that caused violence? Would we easily give in to violence ourselves because it has always been a "silly thing"? I hope that our world today will recognize Collins and her attempt to warn them about violence and its effects.
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