Read The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Online
Authors: Lois H. Gresh
The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (4 page)
Says Branko Milanovi
, “. . . you have an entrenched elite that basically maintains its own high position to the detriment of others.”
13
How different is our real world, then, to what we see in The Hunger Games? The rich have all the resources. The rich have all the powerful jobs. The rich control everyone else. These are factors, as we’ll soon see, that lead to repression and in many cases, revolutions and rebellions. Perhaps the future as reflected in The Hunger Games series posits a collapse of our civilization as inequalities take hold and the government clamps down on civil liberties and human rights. It’s not all that farfetched.
The term, “Big Brother,” is well known in this country. It symbolizes government power and the collapse of civil liberties and rights. It personifies government surveillance.
In George Orwell’s 1949 novel,
1984,
Big Brother is the figurehead of the Party; he may be a real person, he may be just a symbol. He appears as the dictator of Oceania on gigantic telescreens and posters in order to issue propaganda. In The Hunger Games, President Snow, Caesar Flickerman, and the Games are force-fed to citizens via televisions set up in all the Districts. The propaganda is constant.The Oceania government controls and harasses citizens, spies on everyone, dehumanizes people, and penalizes those who invoke freedom of speech. The same is certainly true in the world of The Hunger Games. A classic dystopian novel,
1984
shows us a future that follows a global war. After the war, three super-states divide the land masses up and then control everyone in their provinces. The individual must do as the government wants, and the government controls everyone and everything. The Proles, or Proletariats, constitute 85 percent of the population, and as in our real world and in the world of The Hunger Games, this vast majority has no power and no wealth, and they serve the whims of the rich. The Inner Party, representing only 2 percent of the population, are like the super-wealthy in our population who have the most power. They are also like the Gamemakers, Peacekeepers, and Mayors in The Hunger Games. Citizens are so dehumanized that they’re known as “unpersons.” And children are used as spies, even against their own parents. As in The Hunger Games, children are pawns of the evil empire, which forces them to do the government’s will and destroy any semblance of free thought and speech by their parents. Remember, the children are tools of the government in The Hunger Games; if the Capitol controls the children and tortures/executes them at whim, then the evil empire has an iron grip on the adults. Basically, the Party in
1984
keeps people impoverished and desperate for basics such as food and shelter, just as the Capitol does in The Hunger Games. Poverty, hunger, and misery: tools that the governments in both books use to control the people.Winston Smith in
1984
is “lucky” to belong to the somewhat middle-class Outer Party, which affords him with “luxuries” such as black bread and gin. He lives in a small apartment, where he’s forced to watch Big Brother on the telescreen; if caught “thinking” rebellious ideas, he could be executed.He eventually rebels against the Party, which arrests, imprisons, and subjects him to beatings, electric shocks, and psychological torture. The Party also arrests and tortures his illegal lover, Julia. The Capitol in The Hunger Games uses similar techniques, and then some (see chapter 6, “Torture and Execution”).
In
1984,
the government controls love affairs, as well. Winston and Julia aren’t supposed to be involved in a romance; hence their imprisonment and torture. The two end up discarding each other, both caving into Big Brother.In The Hunger Games, the government straight up to President Snow, tries to control the romance between Katniss and Peeta to the point of picking out her wedding dress. Both Katniss and Peeta are keenly aware throughout all three books that their romance may be their key to survival. Finally, after shifting out of the severity of tracker jacker hijacking, Peeta clings to his love of Katniss.
Perhaps the most fascinating difference between
1984
and The Hunger Games lies in the conversations between Winston Smith and Julia. Remember, Katniss and Peeta are paranoid about each other’s loyalty during their battles to the death; Katniss tries to save Peeta’s life numerous times; and Peeta is willing to sacrifice himself to save Katniss. But in
1984,
Winston and Julia betray each other. She explains that “they” (the government) threaten the people with things that nobody can “stand up to” or “even think about.” She says that, in the end, “all you care about is yourself.” Sadly, Winston agrees, and they both comment that, after a betrayal in which you’re willing to sacrifice someone else to save your own neck, “you don’t feel the same” about the other person any longer.Yet perhaps the
major
difference is that in
1984,
the police make sure people do not even
think
subversive things. The government controls
thoughts.
Unfortunately, as shown in chapter 9, “Hype Over Substance,” in the real world, much of what people think is controlled by mass media, gossip rags, and news conglomerates. In many cases, we know more about Michelle Obama’s fashions than her husband’s politics. We rarely read or view hard facts about the war in Iraq the same way we accessed the same types of facts during the Vietnam War. Back then, we couldn’t go a day without seeing soldiers wounded, fighting, and dying; without reading the appalling statistics about the number dead, the hopeless war situation, and so forth. We were inundated with facts by news organizations. Today, we have to dig to find out the truth about casualties of war; the number wounded, fighting, and dying. Instead of hard journalism, we’re subjected to hundreds of television channels and thousands of Internet news sites that feed us trivia about gossip, fashion, and style. In
1984
the government controls the people’s view of reality in order to control the people. Nobody in
1984
really knows what’s going on around the world. The use of the Big Lie is rampant in
1984,
whereby Newspeak words can possess meanings that contradict each other.If the government hides the truth long enough and if news sources hide the truth long enough, then what are we left with? Will anyone remember why civilization collapsed? They don’t remember the reasons in The Hunger Games, nor do they remember history in
1984
; indeed, Winston Smith’s job is to revise the past as reported by news organizations. And in our real world, as the media becomes looser and less able to provide us with real facts, what will happen to our civilization? I leave you with
this
:[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and
if you repeat [a lie] frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it
.—The United States Office of Strategic Services,
Hitler As His Associates Know Him.
14
In general, dystopian fiction portrays a bleak world in which everything is pretty much hopeless. A dystopia is not a fun place to live: people are oppressed, dehumanized, and frightened. Typically, the government is highly centralized and totalitarian. The Hunger Games trilogy is an example of dystopian fiction: The world is bleak, everything is pretty much hopeless, people are oppressed, dehumanized, and frightened; and the government is centralized and totalitarian.
Historically, dystopian novels are indictments against frightening social trends. The authors are warning us that our futures will be terrible if these trends persist.
Perhaps one of the earliest dystopian novels was 1921’s
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which focused on an oppressive social order complete with terrorist force and the elimination of any individuality. Along with George Orwell’s
1984,
the novel
We
is considered a classic example of dystopian fiction.
Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
differs somewhat from both
We
and
1984,
in that Huxley’s novel shows the oppressive results of brainwashing, blind faith in the government and technology, and a conscious reduction by the government in the intellectual and individual liberties of citizens.
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury is another classic dystopian novel, very similar to
Brave New World
in that it also shows the oppressive results of brainwashing, blind faith in the government and technology, and a conscious reduction by the government in the intellectual and individual liberties of citizens. Suzanne Collins references
Fahrenheit 451
in
Mockingjay
when she assigns Katniss to Squad 451.
The key difference among the three works might be that
Brave New World
gives us a World State without any war yet with extremely stultifying social stability. In
1984
and
Fahrenheit 451
, things are quite different: everyone’s afraid of enemy attacks and war, and torture and deprivation are commonplace. While people don’t worry about enemy attacks and war in the world of The Hunger Games, they do worry constantly about torture, starvation, and being selected to participate in the Games.
A central idea in
Fahrenheit 451
is that people no longer remember history because the government has obliterated it using technology. People watch television rather than talk to and have fun with friends. They believe whatever propaganda the government is spewing on the television screen, and they no longer have a clue as to what’s real and what isn’t real.
In the The Hunger Games world, people no longer remember what caused the apocalypse, though they do remember—thanks to all the government propaganda on the television screens—why they are being oppressed. The know very little about the actual Dark Days, however, and when subjected to government torture tactics, they fail to differentiate between what’s real and what isn’t real. Peeta, of course, is the prime example of this problem.
Both in
Fahrenheit 451
and The Hunger Games trilogy, the free flow of information is totally censored, and hence, people don’t know what’s happening in the world. In Katniss’s world, nobody really knows what happens in the other districts, and indeed, they don’t even know that District 13 still exists. When Rue tells Katniss about the harsh living conditions and punishments in District 11, Katniss thinks about how little she knows about people outside of District 12, and “because even though the information seems harmless, they don’t want people in different districts to know about one another” (
The Hunger Games,
203).
It’s interesting to note that in the The Hunger Games trilogy as well as in
Brave New World,
religion no longer exists. When their children are selected for the Games, parents don’t fall to their knees and wail to God. When Katniss is in her darkest moments, depressed and suicidal, being forced to kill other children, wondering if Peeta will survive his leg injury and subsequent infection, wondering if her sister will survive, and so on, she does not pray to God. It’s as if all religion has disappeared from Panem. In
Brave New World,
religion is actually taboo, and people are supposed to do little other than make goods and buy them. And yet the goal of government in
Brave New World
—in addition to maintaining an iron grip on everything and everyone—is to keep everyone dulled down and controlled, “happy” as if on tranquilizers. The leaders of Panem definitely aren’t interested in the happiness of its citizens, even if that happiness is fake.
