The Hunger Games Literary Analysis

What causes a nation to become corrupt and evil? In her novel, The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins portrays a country called Panem, through the eyes and voice of 16 year-old Katniss Everdeen. Through the course of this literary work, readers are shown a society that seems to have reached a pinnacle of cruelty and greed. Panem is characterized by a government that does not honor God and His laws. Similar to God’s absence in Panem, the United States as a culture has purposefully and forcefully attempted to remove God from a place of preeminence. This Godlessness is the cause of disastrous consequences to both societies, including an obsession with self-gratification and a desensitization to gratuitous violence. One of the

The nation is composed of twelve districts held under the despotic sway of a city known only as “the Capitol”, and all forms of twisted sacrifice and worship revolve around this Capitol’s tight grip on the subject districts. The most notable of these customs is the annual Hunger Games, where twenty-four children (two from each district) are thrown into an arena in a fight to the death as punishment for a rebellion once made against the Capitol. Katniss, who is herself a resident of District 12, observes that, “Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. ‘Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you’ ” (Collins 19). Clearly, then, the districts are still being made to pay for their rebellion by regularly sacrificing their children to the Capitol. Additionally, the citizens of the Capitol act like the people of the districts exist to provide for them and their entertainment alone. As Katniss puts it, “What

This is openly visible in Panem, where prolonged exposure to the Hunger Games has deadened people’s senses to the carnage in the event. Near the end of the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss decries the heartlessness of the Capitol when another Tribute is being slowly torn to pieces by wild animals. “ ‘Why don’t they just kill him,’ I ask Peeta. ‘You know why,’ he says…..And I do. No viewer could turn away from the show now. From the Gamemaker’s point of view, this is the final word in entertainment” (Collins 339). Not only are the inhabitants of the Capitol inured to the butchery in the Games, they get a sadistic pleasure out of