What people really hunger for in 'The Hunger Games'

What is the meaning of hunger in "The Hunger Games"? Why is the gladiatorial event named after starvation rather than violence?

Originally posted to Helium Network on June 30, 2013.

In the "Hunger Games" trilogy by Suzanne Collins, an oppressive government keeps the population starving. The government divides the country into twelve districts that do not have direct contact with each other, limiting trade. Subsistence hunting is formally banned. The government fosters a sense of dependence and hopelessness in the people by providing extra food rations to those who enter their children’s names in a death lottery.

In the first book, "The Hunger Games," the teenage heroine, Katniss, hunts in the forest in defiance of the law, and she is even successful in selling meat to the police (known as the Peacekeepers), since they want to eat, too. Her priority is to support her mother and sister. She thinks about how being shot to death would be preferable to starving to death, and she doesn’t speculate about why the country has fallen into this oppressive situation, since "I don't see how it [the historical knowledge] will help me get food on the table." Of her hunger, she says, “Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some."

After Katniss survives the mandatory gladiatorial event, one of her rewards as a victor is that extra food will be sent to the hungry families in her home district. "To know that once a month for a year they would all receive another parcel," she thinks to herself at the beginning of the second book, "Catching Fire." "That was one of the few times I actually felt good about winning the Games."

Of course, to survive in the arena, Katniss was forced to kill other children, which weighs on her conscience. Her comment, however, shows that her conscience also takes into consideration the hunger felt by poor families. The government has engineered a social practice by which some are killed in an arena and others starve at home. The burden of choice falls on children like Katniss: she kills to survive in the arena, thereby winning food to save others from starvation, and at some point may actually feel “good” about her performance. She has to rationalize her choices.

In "Catching Fire," Katniss travels widely and sees how different people live. In the privileged capital city, residents do not have the same worries about violence or starvation. Their children do not have to be entered in the lottery to be gladiators. They feast on unlimited amounts of gourmet food, and they even induce vomiting at their parties so that they can return to the tables and eat more. When Peeta, a boy from Katniss’s poor district, is given a glass of such vomit-inducing liquid and realizes what it is for, he “sets his back on the table with such precision you’d think it might detonate.” The wastefulness of eating food only to deliberately vomit it is a grievous moral offense to children who have lived under the fear of starvation their whole lives.

Katniss remembers giving an entire leg of game to a girl who reacted with “the disbelief of the chronically hungry.” She also reflects on how newlyweds in her home district recognize their marriage when they “make their first fire, toast a bit of bread, and share it. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but no one really feels married in District 12 until after the toasting.” This shows how food can be ritualized even in cultures that have very little of it.

While Katniss and Peeta visit wealthy areas, they are aware that the government is becoming stricter and more unfair about food rations. Some families who volunteer extra entries of their children’s names in the lottery never receive the promised food.

Before another round of organized violence in "Catching Fire," Katniss has a nightmare in which she tries “to reach a pool of water that recedes every time I’m about to touch it.” It is prescient, both in the literal sense of thirst and in the sense that, in the future, she will have to work hard to chase something down that will always seem just out of reach.

In the third book, "Mockingjay," Katniss temporarily moves to an underground complex where people eat food grown in underground farms. Food is measured into exact portions according to an individual’s nutritional needs, so “there are never seconds here,” and they cannot take uneaten food out of the dining hall. “We know how to be hungry, but not how to be told how to handle what provisions we have,” she complains. In fact, when the government tries to erase Peeta’s memories, one of the first memories to return is the first day he met Katniss, when he secretly gave her a loaf of bread. His decision to share his food with her was of great personal significance. The social system in the underground district eliminates this personal autonomy, and it is difficult for them to adjust to it. When she has the occasion to get a good meal, she thinks about how a good meal “can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it’s not a mistake to go on living. It’s better than any medicine.”

In Mockingjay, Katniss learns that the wealthy class has “given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power” in exchange for “panem et circenses,” Latin for “bread and circuses,” food and entertainment. They do so on the backs of people who go without food and who send their children to die for entertainment. Katniss becomes a symbol of the growing rebellion against the government. People’s hunger shifts from a physical need to a moral need. “It’s the sight of me, alive, that is the inspiration. Hungry fingers devour me, wanting to feel my flesh,” she reflects.

The evolution of hunger in the Hunger Games trilogy portrays a growing awareness in the young characters that there are different things for which they can be hungry. As children, they were aware of their empty bellies. During the year in which they become adults, they learn that they can hunger for freedom, justice and revenge. Fighting for these “higher” ideals makes food seem to them – at least most of the time – less interesting.

What does it mean for Katniss to 'survive' in 'Hunger Games'?

The character Katniss faces many challenges in the "Hunger Games" trilogy. She faces starvation, violence, and other threats to her life.

Article originally posted to Helium Network on June 30, 2013.

In the "Hunger Games" trilogy by Suzanne Collins, the heroine and her friends must fight to survive. The first book introduces the heroine, Katniss, who is drafted to fight to the death against other teenagers as a kind of televised entertainment. Katniss knows that the boy from her home district is "fighting hard to stay alive,” going so far as to make an apparent alliance with the well-trained fighters from wealthier districts, which also means he's "fighting hard to kill me." Survival in the face of multiple kinds of violence takes on many meanings.

Although Katniss doesn’t want to kill anyone, given the situation, she is forced to do so for her own survival. She is also motivated by her family’s need:  if she doesn’t come home alive, her mother and sister could starve. So, she develops a hatred for certain other fighters in the arena. Regarding the inevitable encounter with a particularly strong, intimidating, brutish boy named Cato, she thinks to herself: "...I'd shoot. I find I'm actually anticipating the moment with pleasure." When a more sensitive boy, Peeta, apologizes for the death of someone who ate poison berries, Katniss tells him: "Don't apologize. It just means we're one step closer to home, right?" After all, the last one standing gets to go home.

Survival of personal identity is a separate question from physical survival. Peeta worries that participating in the game will change who he is, and he prefers to die without giving up his authentic nature as a peaceful person. Katniss, on the other hand, acknowledges that she is already a slave of the state, and her way of protesting is simply to remain angry. When another fighter offends her, she has

"enough fury I think to die with some dignity. As my last act of defiance, I will stare her down as long as I can see, which will probably not be an extended period of time, but I will stare her down, I will not cry out, I will die, in my own small way, undefeated."

In the second book, "Catching Fire," Katniss and Peeta must pretend to be in love with each other. It is part of a psychological game that the ruler imposes upon them. The ruler is aware that a rebellion could sweep the country, and he wants the populace to see Katniss and Peeta as silly children in love – thus Katniss’s assigned stylist goes for “girlish, not sexy” – and not as vital young resistance leaders who point out the chinks in the state’s armor. If Katniss and Peeta don’t do as he says, the ruler can easily have them and their families killed. Katniss understands the ruler’s motivations better than Peeta does, and she believes that “Peeta will perform well whether he knows what's at stake or not.”

Part of what most people think of when they think of “survival” is for things to operate at some level of normalcy. Katniss feels that life is back to normal when the personal stylists assigned to her by the state are no longer requiring her legs to be shaved. Peeta feels more like himself when he can paint a canvas. Being able to go back to “the way things used to be” can be part of psychological survival.

On the other hand, being able to move forward into the future and to adapt is also an important component. If time moves on and leaves someone behind in the past, that person may not survive in the full sense of the word. Katniss’s mentor Haymitch tells her: “You’ll see, the choices you’ll have to make. If we survive this. You’ll learn.” One of the many things Katniss needs to learn is to see things from other people’s perspective. She wonders “how it must have looked from Peeta’s perspective when I appeared in the arena having received burn medicine and bread when he, who was at death’s door, had gotten nothing. Like Haymitch was keeping me alive at his expense.” She also has to understand the choice from Haymitch’s perspective. Understanding why people make certain choices will enable her to predict their actions, which in turn will enable her to prepare and to survive.

When people are focused on survival, they are not able to focus on flourishing, so, in most ways, they are cramped and have few options. There is one sense, however, in which a singular focus on survival can be freeing. After Katniss has tried to meet the ruler’s demands and believes that he is dissatisfied with her, she thinks to herself,

"I can’t guess what form my punishment will take, how wide the net will be cast, but when it is finished, there will most likely be nothing left. So you would think that at this moment, I would be in utter despair. Here’s what’s strange. The main thing I feel is a sense of relief...That if desperate times call for desperate measures, then I am free to act as desperately as I wish."

Katniss begins to feel released from certain routines, social mores, and ethical constraints that could limit the way she fights for her survival. As a general principle, if someone is cruelly prevented from having breakfast every morning, they might resign themselves to keeping track of lunch and dinner, but if the same person is entirely starved, the steps taken to save his or her own life will look like a whole different ball game. They are prodded into fighting back against the person who is depriving them.

In the third book, "Mockingjay," Katniss has a position of responsibility within the citizens’ rebellion against the government. She worries that, if she fails to survive psychologically, she will be of no use to the movement, and then the physical survival of herself and everyone around her will be jeopardized. “What,” she frets, “will break me into a million pieces so that I am beyond repair, beyond usefulness?”

Surviving in the arena turns out to have been good practice for surviving during the rebellion. For those who support her in the rebellion but do not survive, Katniss is aware that she owes them “a debt that can only be repaid in one way” – namely, winning what they set out to do.

Survival is not always a straightforward matter. Just as there are many types of threats, there are different routes that must be taken to survive. People put a lot of energy into their survival strategies, and sometimes the strategies fail. The "Hunger Games" trilogy, exploring the idea of survival from the point of view of a fictional teenager, highlights these complexities.

Image by: Wikimedia Commons user 'Rama' © 'Free software' under CeCILL (www.cecill.info)

Gale or Peeta? Katniss's choice in 'The Hunger Games'

"The Hunger Games" is not a love story, but it reveals complexities of relationships, especially within the context of the pressures of war and subterfuge.

"The Hunger Games," a trilogy for young adults by Suzanne Collins, features a heroine who, along with other teenagers, is sent into an arena with lethal weapons and instructions to try to stay alive. The melee is broadcast on live TV for days. The children are sacrificial gladiators for entertainment of the privileged class and for psychological control of the masses. As the story builds through the second and third book, the heroine matures to adulthood by taking a key role in a rebellion against the cruel government.

The theme of love, then, is tricky. The heroine, Katniss, grew up under the threat of starvation and learned to hunt game illegally to provide for her mother and younger sister. Her sister “is the only person in the world I'm certain I love,” she says. (She’s content to receive “no hissing” from the family cat.) She is close friends with her hunting partner, a boy named Gale, and they have some possible mutual romantic interest, but they have not quite established themselves as a couple when Katniss is called into the arena. This takes place in the best-known first book.

For a while, in the arena, she looks out for a younger girl, a sort of substitute for her younger sister at home. The girl is fatally attacked, and in one of the book’s more poignant scenes, Katniss cradles her and sings a lullaby: “Here is the place where I love you.”

The real love story, however, involves a boy named Peeta. He is also one of the other children Katniss is told she must slaughter in the arena. Back home, Peeta once gave her bread, and Katniss worries that kind people such as him could end up “working their way inside me and rooting there.” They form an alliance in the arena, and this makes Katniss nervous, as all such alliances must be temporary. She kisses Peeta for the benefit of the television cameras, and she finds that playing to the audience in this way seems to improve their survival chances. Initially, it is a pure calculation on her part, but gradually, something grows. “I realize how much I don't want him to die,” she thinks. “And it's not about the sponsors. And it's not about what will happen back home. And it's not just that I don't want to be alone. It's him. I do not want to lose the boy with the bread."

Of course, Katniss cannot sort out her true feelings for two boys while running around the wilderness trying to avoid being brutally murdered. In the second book, she is forced into more introspection after the president himself visits and tells her that he had “doubts” about her romantic performance in the arena. This is the same ruler who put her in the arena to begin with. He orders her to convince him and the public that the romance is real. Katniss and Peeta take a sort of public relations tour to convey their love for each other, but violence erupts. Katniss is going to be forced to marry Peeta, and Gale wants to run away with her before that happens. She declines, although she wishes Gale could know “how much better my life has been...for loving him, even if it’s only in the limited way that I can manage.”

In the third book, the relationships become more nuanced. Katniss, Gale and Peeta are heavily and inextricably involved in a full-scale rebellion against the government. Gale and Peeta do not like each other, but they protect each other because they have Katniss in common. They love Katniss, and they know that Katniss loves them both, in her way. They alternately believe that Katniss may turn her affections toward whoever is most pitiful and needs her help to survive, or toward whoever will somehow help her survive.

In planning war tactics, Gale reveals an especially calculating side of himself. He is keenly aware of the enemy’s cruelty and thought process – as, for example, in their willingness to target injured or unsuspecting people – and he takes an “eye-for-an-eye” approach in his desire to return those tactics. Katniss herself can be calculating, and this plays a factor in her romantic decision.

"The Hunger Games" is not a love story, but it does reveal interesting complexities of relationships, especially within the context of the pressures of war and subterfuge. The characters mature significantly during the course of the year that the story spans. As they mature, they are able to reveal more of their own unique virtues and personal desires.

Originally posted June 30, 2013 to Helium Network.