The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is a dystopian novel about a 14 year old girl who volunteers to be 1 of 24 children between the ages of 12 and 18 who will kill each other until the one remaining is hailed the victor and celebrated as a hero by the whole country.
The plot is gruesome but the writing surprisingly good. This book is apparently marketed by Scholastic Press for 9 - 12 graders. The premise of this book is very dark and forefoding in that it proposes the idea that a government has it in its interest to encourage state sanctioned violence to provide a sense of competition, entertainment,and pride in the citizens of the 12 districts of the country. While this premise seems outlandish, I was given pause when I reflected on the function that war has served for the United States in my lifetime as manifested in two immoral and senseless wars of Viet Nam and Iraq. In the Viet Nam war my peers were drafted to be killed, 58,000 of them in foreign lands, which provided the political fodder and entertainment for decades after in the form of movies, books, novels, songs, etc.
The celebration of violence impresses me as pornographic and continues to proliferate in our society. The Hunger Games could be viewed as exquisite social satire and criticism if it is not taken more literally as a thriller and somewhat silly and unbelievable love story.
I don't recommend this book unless you are interested in violent dystopian novels in which case this is one of the better ones that I've read.
No comments:
Post a Comment