Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins imagines a world where children are made to hunt each other for sport, all in the name of creating compelling reality television and keeping the proletariat down. Ostensibly, this is a book about the wrongness of offering up violence as entertainment. But isn’t that the appeal of this novel too? Specifically, I have a problem with the way Collins depicts some of the “tributes” as deserving of death; there are tributes from the rich districts who are depicted as pampered and egotistical. In characterizing them like this, Collins apparently means for us to join in the “fun” of the games, to root for protagonist Katniss as she kills her uppity competitors. The only way the inhumanity of the games could have really gotten across was if Katniss was made to kill sympathetic figures—she never does. 

I think Collins would say no, what compels the plot is the romance between Peeta and Katniss, our two heroes who are made to fight all those snotty rich kids to the death. The conflict, the book’s defenders might argue, is between the “Tributes” and the “Gamemakers”—not merely among all the tributes fighting each other. I could buy this if the romance were a more compelling element of the book, if Collins seemed even half as interested in it as she does the bloodbath. Katniss’s ambivalence about anything besides hunting and muscle drains the life out of the romantic elements of the book.

Speaking of which, why exactly is Katniss the narrator? First person narration is really only effective, I feel, if the narrator has a distinctive or engaging voice. Because she is a figure mostly defined by her athleticism and physical prowess, Katniss’s voice seems pretty generic and forgettable. Third-person-omniscient is needed here. As the novel is structured now, the narration is question-begging. I am wanting at every moment to know how the audience is reacting to seeing Katniss on television (especially because she constantly tantalizes us with what's out of the frame, saying things to the effect of “Gee, I’ll bet they’re sure going nuts watching me right now”). She’s supposedly creating a quite a stir in the Capital, and if that tension is supposed to be the crux of the conflict, why are the readers locked out of what’s going on among the big-wigs? Collins keeps her villains trapped in the shadows. Depicting the bad guys like this might be easier for the author, but it reduces any complex approach towards morality that the book might have aspired to.

The Hunger Games is strongly reminiscent of two famous stories—Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, and Richard Connell’s short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” (the latter I suspect Collins read in high school, but then, while writing The Hunger Games, she half-forgot who she was stealing from). The two works combined are shorter than The Hunger Games, but a quick reading of either makes clear everything Collins missed. Bradbury and Connell give their villains time to talk, to explain themselves in a way that makes them all the more believable and terrifying—all the more recognizable among figures we see in real life. They develop their protagonists too. Fahrenheit and “Dangerous Game” are stories of conversion, of minds made to be more self-critical. Collins, by contrast, simply asks us to reject what is obviously grotesque from page one. Katniss ends the book simply as a more vivid version of who she was in the beginning. The reader is given a warm hug for identifying with her all along. 

Come on, Suzanne, give us a challenge!      

(NOTE: Okay, fine, I’ve only read the first book. Maybe, maybe, maybe the next two will address all these concerns. I am interested, too, in seeing if the movie, freed from Katniss’s narrow narration, can fill in some of the blanks in order to create something enjoyable).