'Hunger Games' is Food For Thought

Right now  Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy has taken over my life. I'm presenting a paper on it, writing an essay on it and now writing a blog post about it. The question is, why? I've never really been into popular young adult  fiction. This is mainly because I find it difficult to follow a series of books. I usually prefer to be done with a single group of characters after one book. Keeping track of them for two or more is a hell of a lot of work. Plus, I hate to generalize but I get the impression that, with the exception of a few gems, much of it is Twilight with different front covers and character names.

In many ways The Hunger Games trilogy suffers from the usual flaws of this genre. It is not particularly well written, it has one of those icky love triangles and the the story is told, rather annoyingly, through the eyes of Katniss Everdeen, the strong-willed female protagonist. This greatly  limits our engagement with the world Collins attempts to create because we are never given the opportunity to see what happens outside of Katniss's head (the strength of the first film is that it does remove us from the inner workings of Katniss's mind). More than this, as the trilogy progresses, the narrative becomes increasingly more complicated and Collins appears to  continuously battle to steer it towards its conclusion.

With all these faults, why am I so besotted with The Hunger Games? Well, regardless of these flaws, the trilogy is not just gripping but also surprisingly insightful on a broad range of subjects. Though the trilogy has rightfully been deemed a fusion between 1984 and Lord of the Flies, it's not as contextually bound to a particular time period or thematic concerns as these works are. A single book in the trilogy could be read from numerous different perspectives.On one hand, it could be read as a commentary on the inner workings of the media and the artificiality of reality TV. On another, it could be said to bear the markers of a Christian allegory. In her continuous efforts to sacrifice herself for her family and lead her district to freedom, Katniss essentially is a female, futuristic Christ-like figure. Then there are the various political or historical narratives that  can be associated with the trilogy. Collins formulated the idea for the trilogy while watching a news broadcast on the war in Iraq. Indeed, there are many associations that could be made between the events of this war and the narrative which folds in The Hunger Games trilogy. However, the trilogy could just as easily be associated with, amongst other things, the politics we face in South Africa which present us with a very different kind of war. Is the Capitol not essentially like the ANC in some ways? The separation of the districts itself also speaks to issues of xenophobia that still plague our country on a daily basis.  In my studies I associate the trilogy with Holocaust narratives. The fact that I can draw a comparison between a a trilogy that takes place in a very distant future and the terrible events that transpired in Nazi Germany between 1939-1945, attests to the richness one can find when digging into the subtext of The Hunger Games trilogy.

I think what is most impressive about The Hunger Games trilogy is that by presenting young adult readers with all these varying subtexts, the trilogy allows them to engage knowingly and astutely with the world around them. Unlike the brainless, misogynistic  Twilight which, as Stephen King attests to, is all about how to get a boyfriend, The Hunger Games is about engaging with the world we lived in in the past and the world we live in today. It encourages readers to think, question and (in some cases) take action. The success of the trilogy is testimony to the fact that young readers are becoming increasingly more preoccupied with learning about their socio-political reality and, in doing so, approaching it from a challenging and analytical perspective. If a teenager who reads The Hunger Games is inspired to become president one day then Collins has done a fantastic job.

Source for photo 1: http://screenrant.com/hunger-games-movie-books-facts-kofi-160434/
Source for photo 2: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/mar/22/the-hunger-games-review