The Hunger Games Reality Analysis

Title: “2+2=5”, The Ultimate Question to Reality In our daily lives, we take the reality for granted. For us, reality is an objective state of affairs, not to be questioned. Dystopian literature breaks this assumption; it explores the subjective versions of reality under inhumane circumstances, to investigate our innate perception of reality at a fundamental level. In this essay, I will thoroughly investigate the theme of versions of reality and reveal the pathological nature of it. In The Hunger Games, the Game itself skews the perception of reality; it is portrayed as an entertainment TV show, although it is a thinly disguised agony and a blatant violation of human rights. The deception also continues at the individual level. As the tributes were forced to play the Game in extreme conditions, they dissociated from the reality. They acclimated to the violence and became numb, slowly losing the sense of morality. Being conscious of the camera, they also disconnected from their true feelings and pretended to be fine when they were actually on the verge of nervous breakdown. This was the version of reality suitable to be broadcasted.

This notion is absurd in our real world, but due to the systematic denial and reconstruction of reality, the dynamics of perception were vastly different in 1984. Since the party could forge any record and manipulate any literature, they only had to deceive the people’s mind to alter the past. In the same line of speech, O’Brien utters the famous quote of “2+2=5”, that even self-evident truths can be tampered to match the politically preferred version of reality by collective brainwashing. This is the ultimate question to reality; is two plus two still four when everybody firmly believes