In societies across the world it is clear that many children never have a ‘childhood naivety’ due to events, circumstance or even people in their lives. I have chosen to explore the theme “the tragic premature loss of childhood innocence.” We are shown this theme in the novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the film My Sister’s Keeper directed by Nick Cassavetes, the film Slumdog Millionaire directed by Danny Boyle and the novel Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian.
We first see the theme of the tragic premature loss of childhood innocence in the novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Collins shows us this theme through the novel’s main protagonist Katniss. After the death of Katniss’ father when she is only 11 years old, her mother
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We see this through the main protagonist Anna who states “I was engineered, born for a particular reason. A scientist hooked up my mother’s eggs and my father’s sperm to make a specific combination of genes. He did it to save my sister's life.” Because Anna is the only genetically able donor in her family, she goes through many serious medical treatments to help her older sister Kate, eventually she requires a kidney. Kate asks Anna to do her a favour, she asks Anna to set her free. “Tell them you’re important too, tell them you want to play soccer, tell them you want to cheerlead” Kate says to Anna “They’ll never believe me” Anna replies “Yeah they will. And you wanna know why? Because it’s the truth.”. This quote is from the scene where Kate helps Anna to feel comfortable making the decision not to donate her kidney just because her mother says she should. Cassavetes has done this to show us that Anna will no longer be undergoing surgeries blindly like a child would. Anna’s circumstances meant that she lost her childhood innocence earlier than she probably would have otherwise as she begins to think about herself, what she’s been through, and the repercussions it could have for her in the future. Another way of looking at this theme in relation Anna’s situation is through the possibility that she didn't have a childhood innocence to lose. Because Anna has always known that she was born to save Kate and because of all of the surgeries and emotional trauma that this knowledge came with, Anna has grown up with a heavy weight on her shoulders. This would mean that Anna never had any sense of naivety about the world around her because she has been dealing with very adult problems her whole life and therefore never had any ‘childhood
Analyzing innocence has always been a difficult task, not only due to it’s rapid reevaluation in the face of changing societal values, but also due to the highly private and personal nature of the concept. The differences between how people prioritize different types of innocence - childhood desires, intellectual naivety, sexual purity, criminal guilt, etc. - continually obscures the definition of innocence. This can make it difficult for people to sympathize with others’ loss of purity, simply because their definition of that loss will always be dissimilar to the originally expressed idea. Innocence can never truly be adequately described, simply because another will never be able to precisely decipher the other’s words. It is this challenge, the challenge of verbally depicting the isolationism of the corruption of innocence, that Tim O’Brien attempts to endeavour in his fictionalized memoir, The
Yamato, Jen. Burning Questions.“The Hunger Games and Real World Parallels: “Can kids all become Katniss Everdeen”. Movie Line. March 13, 2012. Web. May 04, 2012
The end of child innocence is a significant part of transitioning into young adulthood. This is illustrated in “Marigolds,” a short story written by Eugenia Collier, that takes place in a small town trapped in poverty during the Great Depression. The main character Lizabeth is a fourteen-year-old girl who is playing with her brother and neighborhood friends and just being kids when she simultaneously encounters an experience that teach about compassion, which eventually helps her step into adulthood. Through Lizabeth’s childhood experience, Collier portrays that maturity is based on compassion and overcoming the innocence of childhood.
Katniss is the main character in the novel, The Hunger Games. The author of this book is Suzanna Collins. Katniss is a 16 year old who has been chosen with 23 other tributes. In my class we have studied themes and key ideas such as Power of the Capitol, Competition against other tributes and Sacrifice for what Katniss acts and does in the Hunger Games. There are many themes but I have chosen these 3 because they show the most emotions and power.
Loss of Innocence is a classic theme in literature. Protagonists are forced into situations where they must sacrifice their goodness/what they believe. It is a theme that runs through both “ Young Goodman Brown” and “ The Most Dangerous Game”, though each of them happen in a different way.
Innocence is a time when a person has never done something, it is the first step of the theme of innocence to experience. The second step in the movement from innocence to experience, is experience. This step is what is achieved after a person or thing has done something they have never done before or learns something they have never know before. The theme of growth from innocence to experience occurs many times in the first part of To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. This process is one of the central themes in the first eleven chapters of this book, because it shows how Scout and Jem change and mature.
Love and loyalty are commonly associated with humanity and freedom, which is why they are often featured within the Dystopian genre in which dictatorships try to change what it means to be human. Love and loyalty are common themes running throughout George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1949 and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, written in 2008.
In a not-too-distant, some 74 years, into the future the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 13 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games; these children are referred to as tributes (Collins, 2008). The Games are meant to be viewed as entertainment, but every citizen knows their purpose, as brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts. The televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the 24 participants are forced to eradicate their competitors, literally, with all citizens required to watch. The main character throughout the series is a 16-year-old girl from District 12 named Katniss Everdeen.
My thesis statement is that children’s innocence enables them to cope in difficult situations. Children generally have a tendency to lighten the mood in sad situations because of their innocent nature. They turn even the saddest situations to mild, innocent situations. This is evident when Marjane says “these stories had given me new ideas for games”, (Satrapi, 55). By saying this she refers to her uncle’s stories of how he and other prisoners were tortured in prison. Stories of torture have never been easy to hear even for adults but Marjane so innocentl...
Innocence is usually associated with youth and ignorance. The loss of one’s innocence is associated with the evils of the world. However, the term “innocence” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Similarly, the loss of one’s innocence can be interpreted in more than one way, and, depending on the interpretation, it may happen numerous times. The loss of innocence is culture specific and involves something that society holds sacrosanct.
The movie “The Hunger Games” has many similarities and relations to World Mythology. While it may not seem like this movie is as myth related as others, such as Troy and Thor, many of the themes and situations in the movie were inspired by the stories of the great myths and epics. The overall theme of the movie is courage, strength, and destiny.
In a nation where children and teenagers fight each other to the death for live entertainment annually, what social norms can actually be considered ethical? This is the question that Katniss Everdeen faces throughout The Hunger Games series. She must choose between doing what is right, and what is accepted, because in her world, the wrong thing is breaking the rules, no matter how wrong they may be. The rules that she deals with are much different than the ethical principles that people in the real world deal with, but for Katniss and the rest of the districts in Panem, these rules are what they have known their entire lives. Catching Fire is the second installment in The Hunger Games trilogy, based on the books written by Suzanne Collins,
The idea of childhood innocence is one that could be interpreted in many different ways. Yusef Komunyakaa’s “English”, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, Peter Tait’s “Too much information destroys childhood innocence”, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are all pieces that demonstrate how childhood innocence is preserved. In “English”, Komunyakaa describes a boy who sees an airstrike during a war and thinks it is a celebration because no one has ever explained the concept of war to him. “Harrison Bergeron” demonstrates a society that is very conservative about the knowledge they allow its civilians to obtain. Peter Tait’s article on preserving childhood innocence exposes the truths about social media and the easy access kids
Appearance and fashion are important factors that drive our societies today. We live in a world where people are judged by the way they look, dress and carry themselves. This phenomenon is display by Suzanne Collins in her New York Times bestseller trilogy the “Hunger Games”. In this book, Collins presents a dystopian world, a world that is awful and terrible. The different themes used in this book are violence, corruption, obsession, inequality and physical appearance and they somehow related to our world. She compared Panem with our world. The goal of the book is to warn people that if we don’t used resources efficiently, if we don’t help each other, if we still obsessed with money we will end up killing each other. During the games, look and appearance were surprisingly one way to win. Like the Hunger Games, people nowadays are giving too much importance in their look because society has leaded them to. It may seems unexpected to compare the Hunger games to our world but unfortunately, look became an important factor of decisions. Suzanne Collins does an amazing job in her book by warning us of how the future could be if we do not change our behavior, but what are the links and signs to our actual world and how is that a danger for societies?.
Abstract In this essay, I intend to explain how everyday lives challenge the construction of childhood as a time of innocence. In the main part of my assignment, I will explain the idea of innocence, which started with Romantic discourse of childhood and how it shaped our view of childhood. I will also look at two contradictory ideas of childhood innocence and guilt in Blake’s poems and extract from Mayhew’s book. Next, I will compare the images of innocence in TV adverts and Barnardo’s posters. After that, I will look at the representation of childhood innocence in sexuality and criminality, and the roles the age and the gender play in portraying children as innocent or guilty. I will include some cross-cultural and contemporary descriptions on the key topics. At the end of my assignment, I will summarize the main points of the arguments.