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The Hunger Games
By Nicola Balkind Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-284-3
CHAPTER 1
The Hunger Games 101: Suzanne as a Fan & the Author's Influences
Author
[right arrow] Like all great dystopias, The Hunger Games is informed by elements from contemporary society. While writing the series, Suzanne Collins was concerned with a number of issues including the impact of the media on children's lives, dangerous decisions made by governments, and poverty. The publicity-shy author describes her creation of the story thus:
I was channel surfing between reality TV programming and actual war coverage when Katniss's story came to me. One night I'm sitting there flipping around and on one channel there's a group of young people competing for, I don't know, money maybe? And on the next, there's a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story. (Scholastic Book Club)
Suzanne Collins's influences in creating The Hunger Games contributed to a publishing marvel. In 2006, she pitched a duology to Scholastic under the working title 'The Tribute of District 12'. Scholastic immediately signed the author to a six-figure, two-book deal – which quickly became a trilogy. This initial book deal – the story of one girl from a small District in the futuristic society of Panem – was the seed of a cultural phenomenon and spectacle worthy of the Capitol itself. Since the first instalment was published in 2008, Suzanne Collins has become one of the world's top-ten highest-earning authors; The Hunger Games movie has earned worldwide box office takings exceeding $690 million; and the series has garnered hordes of fans – calling themselves 'Tributes' – who have made the story their own.
Age-wise, The Hunger Games protagonist Katniss Everdeen is fairly representative of Collins's target audience. Katniss is our window into the world of Panem - she guides us through the story, sharing her experience first-hand, in engaging present tense narration. She is not an explicitly unreliable narrator, and all that remains unknown to the audience is that which Katniss does not discuss, describe, or explain. We can learn more about that which she does not describe, and the greater cultural context that she inhabits, through examination of the author's influences. In a Scholastic Q&A, Collins was posed the following question: 'What do you want young readers to take away from the books?' She answered that she would want readers to think about whether they are taking their next meal for granted while others starve, and to ask questions about the choices that their government or governments around the world make. 'What's your relationship to reality TV versus the news?' she asks her readers. 'Was there anything in the news that disturbed you because they related to your own life, and if there was, what can you do about it?' Collins's ideas about how she wants her reader to relate to The Hunger Games are key.
So are fans, young and otherwise, taking away these key messages from The Hunger Games books? In order to understand the series, and any works of art, including fanworks, which use it as a source of inspiration, we must first seek to understand the author's reverence of her source material. Collins's unique blending of Greek myth and modern war stories are a refreshing take on the modern-day issues. Child soldiers and the impact of reality television and propagandistic media on young people are explored in an arena created for young people, placing them at the centre of the action and the issue. Many critics have cited the opposition that Collins sets up between reality television and war coverage with the suggestion that this story explores the possibility of reality TV being taken to its furthest, darkest conclusion. Collins's work poses this question: What is real, and what is entertainment?
That being said, Collins's source material is not unusual. Reaching back to Greek mythology, the foundational concept in The Hunger Games is based upon the story of 'Theseus and the Minotaur'. There are many variations of the tale, but the key event is King Minós of Crete ordering that Athens must make Tribute, with seven girls and seven boys aged 8 to 14 to be sacrificed to the city, every nine years, and be placed into the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Tributes are chosen by selecting shards of pottery from a basket: those who draw a piece marked with an X are the chosen ones. Their fate is a terrifying battle to the death where none have been known to survive. Theseus puts himself in place of a Tribute – a young girl, no less – with plans to sacrifice himself. But he emerges a victor, saving the life of the child Aktaíans in the process. In the myth, Agaeus of Athens wonders how many draws it will take until his people rise up in rebellion. The rebels of The Hunger Games's Districts wonder the same – and, where the story begins, 74 years after the end of the Dark Days and into the rule of Panem's Capitol government, the residents of this dystopian future finally have an answer.
In a Q&A with Scholastic, Collins says,
A significant influence would have to be the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The myth tells [of] punishment for past deeds [...] [and] even as a kid, I could appreciate how ruthless this was. Crete was sending a very clear message: 'Mess with us and we'll do something worse than kill you. We'll kill your children.' And the thing is, it was allowed; the parents sat by powerless to stop it. Theseus, who was the son of the king, volunteered to go. I guess in her own way, Katniss is a futuristic Theseus. In keeping with the classical roots, I send my tributes into an updated version of the Roman gladiator games, which entails a ruthless government forcing people to fight to the death as popular entertainment.
Like Theseus, Katniss volunteers as Tribute. Some translations of the myth see Theseus take the place of a particularly sweet, small, innocent young girl, who is terrified at her fate. Rather than seeking the Minotaur at the heart of the Labyrinth, as Theseus does, Katniss's motivation is to protect that which she loves most: she is sacrificing herself to save her younger sister, Prim. Like Theseus, she leads many Tributes to safety, forging alliances and joining forces with Peeta against the Gamemakers and President Snow (who could be read as King Minós, and the Muttations with which he fills his Arena, the Minotaur). Each Tribute is deadly, but none so much as the Capitol's wrath. As the author indicates above, Collins's Capitol sends the same message to its Districts as Crete did the Aktaíans.
Katniss's overall trajectory throughout the series can also be compared with the historical Thracian gladiator Spartacus. Like Katniss, Spartacus transforms from slave to gladiator, gladiator to rebel, then rebel to face of a war. Spartacus' rebellion led to the Third Servile War with the Roman Empire, mirroring Panem's second major rebellion led by the Mockingjay.
Panem et Circences is at the root of the name of the fictional country where our story is set: Panem. From the Roman for 'Bread and Circuses', this refers to the exchange of entertainment for the needs or wants of the populous. Give them bread and circuses and they'll do anything. These reciprocal factors are at the centre of Collins's entire notion of war and reality television – particularly the latter. In order to have entertainment, the people must sacrifice themselves. In order to have food, they must sacrifice their freedoms and risk their lives. A meagre year's worth of grain and oil is known as Tessera (or in plural, Tesserae), and is exchanged for another token in the draw for the person who claims it. In Panem, the children of the Districts must sacrifice themselves in this way and increase their odds of becoming unwilling contenders in this brutal form of entertainment. Like the Aktaíans, their names are drawn from a random lottery known as the Reaping.
The Capitol also takes on a number of Roman influences, from its excesses to the names of its population. 'The world of Panem, particularly the Capitol, is loaded with Roman references,' Collins tells Scholastic, and this is clear to see from the moment Katniss sets foot in the Capitol. Capitol citizens, and particularly its leaders, resemble those of the Roman set: Roman Emperors and their allies. 'Gamemakers' fight their way to the top of this white-collar gladiatorial race. Just as Tributes turned Victors become celebrities, Gamemakers are the brains behind the Hunger Games – they are the television makers, the cogs in the machine of the Capitol's Panem et Circences regime. Children in the adjoining, richer Districts 1 and 2, often known as 'Career Tributes' or simply 'Careers' on account of their pre-Hunger Games military training, also boast gladiatorial Roman names, or simply gauche ones like Marvel and Cato, Glimmer and Clove.
The Gamemakers and Capitol citizens' names refer to the likes of Julius Caesar (Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games); the philosopher Seneca (Seneca Crane, head Gamemaker); counsel of the Roman Republic, Lucius Cornelius Cinna (Cinna, Katniss's stylist and potential rebel); and Career Tribute Cato (Cato the Younger, stubborn and tenacious political statesmen of the late Roman Republic). Fan books like 2012's The Panem Companion by V. Arrow and Katniss the Cattail by Valerie E. Frankel look into these names and their meanings in great detail. For our purposes, even a quick skim over these names and their potential meanings demonstrates a great interest and influence of Roman names and culture on the part of Suzanne Collins.
Some the author's favourite novels also hold references that can be interpreted as influences. Collins herself has pointed to Bathsheeba Everdene, the lead character from Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) as one inspiration for the name Katniss Everdeen. She has listed some of her favourite novels for Scholastic, which included a mention of Dandelion Wine (1957) by Ray Bradbury – a possible reference to Peeta as Katniss's dandelion, her reminder that spring, and better, more prosperous days would come.
Collins has cited the formative years she spent away from home in Grades 7-10 as a time when she came to love some of her favourite novels, including A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith and A Wrinkle in Time (1962) by Madeleine L'Engle. 'I'm sure that the choice to make coal mining District 12's industry had to be influenced by Emile Zola's Germinal, [1885]' she told This is Teen in an interview prior to the release of Mockingjay.
Characters from the outer Districts are often named in direct opposition to those of the Capitol and Careers. The natural, plant-like and healing names of Katniss, her family, friends and allies seems to correspond with Collins's interest in her father's dabbling in edible plants. Katniss, or Sagittaria, is an aquatic root plant – she quips that her father told her that 'as long as you can find yourself, you'll never starve'. Appropriately, Sagittaria is also known as 'arrowhead'. Her sister, Primrose, is fairly self-explanatory. Katniss's ally in the Arena, Rue, takes her name from a small mountain flower, Ruta graveolens, and she demonstrates knowledge of healing plants to save Katniss. Rue hails from District 11, a harvesting District, where her fellow Tribute is named Thresh – the action of separating grain from wheat. This direct opposition between earthy, homegrown names and those of Roman gladiators and wartime thinkers sets up a clear opposition. While Collins deals with the blurring of boundaries, some of her further influences are also crystal clear.
As well as wartime thinkers, Collins is also concerned with the question of war itself: modern wars and who fights them, how this is orchestrated, and how we watch this narrative as it is played out in something close to realtime. Flipping, as Collins was, through television channels can blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. How do we tell the difference between real-life war coverage versus a film about the war? How does this differ, morally and aesthetically, to an advert for a popular war-themed video game or, say, a reality show about the lives of troops? In her video with This is Teen, Suzanne Collins notes:
There's this potential for desensitising the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldiers dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break, it's not something fabricated, it's not a game, it's your life.
We, as readers, are given a privileged position within the storyworld of The Hunger Games; a unique insight into the experience of one Citizen of Panem. We read Katniss's thoughts in first person, a realtime, present tense, internal dialogue. By experiencing the Games through the eyes of a Tribute we are also given another vantage point: that of the close family member of a Tribute. We become privy to Katniss's thoughts, actions and reactions; but are also put in the place of a family member losing a sibling to the Reaping, a friend and neighbour, and someone who owes a debt of gratitude in a hard and desperate world. Katniss's perspective looks out to all of these viewpoints, and infers enough for us to imagine the rest. From Katniss's perspective, we are invited to deride Capitol citizens – though later, when she learns their own struggles, many become humanized and we are invited to empathize with their plight. This position allows and facilitates empathy with Panem citizens of all creeds: those who, like Katniss, are too poor to fend for themselves claim Tesserae and find other means for survival. Katniss's mother, a widow, represents women marginalized further from a broken society, while Gale's mother bears the burden of many children and Gale a forced adulthood. Madge Undersee, the Mayor's daughter, is also presented as a suffering member of the upper class. Despite being sheltered compared with Katniss, Madge is far from immune to the Capitol's wrath. And still they are greeted with the Capitol's sing-song well-wishes, 'May the odds be ever in your favour.'
A position of empathy is imperative in the setting-up of this tale and exploration of fact versus fiction. Within the story these strands are shown from Katniss's perspective and the Hunger Games events deviate from what we – or at least Katniss – know to be true. We never hear the first names of Katniss's parents, or Gale's father, for example. What's important is that by experiencing the world through Katniss's eyes, and just as the Districts become drawn to her as a (literally) fiery beacon, readers and characters alike rally around Katniss as a sole source of hope. We discover that even before she entered the Games, townsfolk admired her tenacity and strength, and it is with this power that she earns herself sponsors in the Arena. She is there to sacrifice herself in place of her family, and this becomes a major theme.
The importance of family rings true throughout the books, as does the way the author handles such dark subject matter in a story aimed at teens. In interviews, Suzanne Collins cites her father's experiences growing up during the Depression and involvement as a serviceman during the Vietnam War, and these influences are clear. When asked in a Scholastic Q&A what drew her to such serious subject matters as poverty, starvation, oppression and the effects of war upon others, she answered:
That was probably my dad's influence. He was career Air Force, a military specialist, a historian, and a doctor of political science. When I was a kid, he was gone for a year in Vietnam. It was very important to him that we understood about certain aspects of life. So, it wasn't enough to visit a battlefield, we needed to know why the battle occurred, how it played out, and the consequences. Fortunately, he had a gift for presenting history as a fascinating story. He also seemed to have a good sense of exactly how much a child could handle, which is quite a bit.
More specifically, she also cites his experiences close to the breadline:
Some things I knew from listening to my dad talking about his childhood. He grew up during the Depression. For his family, hunting was not a sport but a way to put meat on the table. He also knew a certain amount about edible plants [...] I also read a big stack of wilderness survival guidebooks. And here's what I learned: you've got to be really good to survive out there for more than a few days.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Hunger Games by Nicola Balkind. Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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