The Hunger Games: Fiction or Reality?

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Fiction is “the act of feigning, inventing, or imagining”, but in Suzanne Collin’s book, The Hunger Games, fiction is merely a reflection of what is already going on in the world today (“Fiction”). Could this fiction novel, The Hunger Games, really be America’s future? Well, major themes in the book such as inequality between rich and poor, suffering as entertainment, importance of appearance, and government control point toward the answer being yes.
Primarily, the major comparison between the novel and our world today is the theme of inequality between rich and poor. In The Hunger Games, there is an immense gap between the rich and the poor. The rich living in the city’s capitol, Panem, and the poor living in the twelve districts, therefore “the result is a huge disparity between their lives and the lives of the poor” (“The Hunger Games”). This lack of equality reveals itself in many ways throughout the novel. The first example being food, and starvation among district twelve also known as “where you can starve to death in safety” (6). Katniss and her family struggle to survive, forcing Katniss to hunt illegally outside of the district electric fences. If it were not for her hunting, her family would starve. Another example of inequality, is the tessera system and the way the tributes are chosen for the games. The day of the reaping is when tributes are chosen to participate in the hunger games. The concept is for the drawing of names to be as fair as possible, yet that is not true. In addition to the first time the children’s names are put in, the children can enter their names further times in exchange for extra rations of food and oil. Therefore, the poor are more likely to have more entries than wealthy families, due to the...

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...tive or imaginative art form? Or does it derive its ideas from the world today? In Suzanne Collins case, The Hunger Games uses major themes to display the connection of fiction to reality. The real question is, are the odds ever in your favor?

Works Cited

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print.
"Fiction." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, 2014. Web. 02 May 2014.
"The Hunger Games - Book Theme Hypable." Hypable. Ed. Brandi Delhagen and Donya Abramo. Hypable, 2013. Web. 01 May 2014.
"The Hunger Games." SparkNotes. SparkNotes LLC, 2014. Web. 01 May 2014.
"Survivor." TV.com. CBS Interactive Inc., n.d. Web. 02 May 2014.
"Hunger in America." Outnumber Hunger. Feeding America, 2014. Web. 02 May 2014.
"U.S. Hunger." Bread. Convio, 2014. Web. 02 May 2014.
"William J. Clinton." The White House. The White House, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.

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