: Re: Preventing the symbolic conflict of "Hunger Games" from overshadowing widespread social plight SPOILER ALERT: Questions and answers may contain spoilers for all three books in the Hunger Games

@Reiling826

Vote Up Vote Down

Interesting take on the series, and I can certainly see your point, however I do not completely accept your opinion, and therefore cannot offer you an answer to your question, only provide my own views and hope you can glean some insights from them.

Note: I've only recently finished the trilogy, which I suspect I will return to for repeated readings in the future, but so far, from one read, this is the way I see the structure presented.

While I agree with you that there are two distinct conflicts (the social one and the Hunger Games), and that the latter stems from the former, where I disagree is the notion that they are separate except for when Collins consciously tries to integrate them. I see the trilogy more in roughly this paradigm:

1) The Hunger Games - thesis
2) Catching Fire - antithesis
3) Mockingjay - synthesis

I'll elaborate. Book One more-or-less presents the "classic" situation you describe. While the subjugation of the Districts is certainly present throughout the book, it's actually the secondary conflict - the Hunger Games - that takes the stage, with the everything else in the background. While the Games don't actually begin until about halfway through the book, the build-up towards them is almost immediate and they occupy the entire novel, either in preparation or execution. This is what has enabled it to be adapted so successfully to screenplay form, a feat that will be much harder as the series progresses.
It's no accident that the main antagonist - President Snow - is reduced to an "extra" in the book, and that the head Gamemaker - Seneca Crane - is nowhere to be seen and in fact is only introduced in Catching Fire as a posthumous character. In fact, the movie had to bolster these roles as preparation for the sequels! If the film was stand-alone, I doubt they'd even appear. The first book focuses almost exclusively on the personal - Katniss' struggle to survive and her relationships, particularly with Peeta and Haymitch. Any social commentary is incidental and provided as background information, and the "game-changing" ending is in fact precisely as you describe it: unexpected, unpredictable and destabilizing.

However, Book Two, while seemingly retaining the same basic pattern, actually does quite a lot to subvert it. So much, in fact, that in many ways it's the complete opposite of the first book. Unlike it, it focuses almost exclusively on the political rather than the personal. Consider: first of all the Games do not feature into it in any meaningful form until Katniss' discovery that she will be forced back into the arena, again about halfway through the book (a reveal heavily implied to be itself a political move). The relationships have been firmly established and while we still spend some time on them, they don't actually develop in ay meaningful way, except for the artificial, playing-to-the-camera aspect, which become more and more absurd and obvious political machinations. President Snow and the new Gamemaster are introduced and are prominent characters, and the repercussions of Katniss' actions in the first book are spreading into a full-scale rebellion along with the reveal of the mockingjay as its symbol, culminating in the destruction of District 12 at the end of the book. Most importantly, the Game itself this time is an arena of political maneuvering, not simple twisted mass entertainment. The tributes this time are all victors, experienced not just in killing but also in the way the world really works. They know each other beforehand and, indeed, many are involved in a secret pact to subvert the games by making sure Katniss and Peeta, the symbols of the rebellion, are saved, even at the cost of their life. This pact was engineered by non other than Haymitch, the so-called clownish, drunken mentor figure, who is revealed to be in reality a cool, calculating political animal (a fact hinted throughout the first two books but only confirmed at the end of the second) who is in fact one of the leaders of the rebellion. Even Katniss' personal agenda is reversed - whereas in the first book every single move she makes apart from volunteering is designed to increase the odds of her survival, here her aim is to save Peeta, a sign that she is moving beyond small-time, self-centered thinking into a realization that she is part of something bigger than herself, which may require her to sacrifice her life. While the ending is still unexpected, it also sped a process already underway, and is therefore no longer unpredictable and destabilizing.

Book Three can easily be seen as the culmination of the action in the series. There are no longer any Hunger Games, and now it's an all-out war, with Katniss playing a figurehead as the Mockingjay. That's a valid viewpoint; I just don't happen to agree with it. As Katniss realizes early in the book, the Game never ended, it just transformed. The third novel abandons the structure of the previous two and instead fuses together the political and the deeply personal on every conceivable level. All the elements from the previous two books are still there, but they are now so mixed together it becomes impossible to tell them apart any longer. At one point Snow himself is referred to being a contestant in the Game - the Game of who lives and who dies, which reaches its terrible climax with the death of Katniss' sister, the one for whom she kick-started the whole thing to begin with, as the result of a coldly calculated war-crime, which on a smaller scale could be seem on the arena. This action in itself, because it is so personal, has profound political implications in the rest of the war and Panem, as Katniss realizes there is no real difference between Snow and Coin and goes from being the symbol of the revolution to subverting it by actually killing its leader in retaliation for Prim's death.

This is my understanding of the series as a whole. I apologize if it failed to directly answer your question, but I hope it might provoke some sort of insight or discussion.

(0)

Login to post a comment!