The Hunger Games: the Booa and the Movie

The Hunger Games started out as a book published in 2008 by Suzanne Collins; soon after came Catching Fire and Mockingjay. In 2012, it became a four-part film series. The setting to the story is in a future post-apocalyptic time in a country called Panem. The country is divided into 12 districts, 1 being the most wealthy and 12 being the poorest. Every year the government, which is called the Capitol, chooses a boy and a girl from each district to participate in what is called The Hunger Games. The plot to the story begins when the main character Katniss volunteers as tribute when her little sister’s name is chosen.

This story presents itself to me as the perfect heroine’s journey which is one of the many ways this book has mythological allusions. Katniss is a teenage girl living with her depressed mother and child sister basically being the man of the house after her father died in a tragic coal mining incident. She has excellent hunting and survival skills and this is very well known to her entire District. After her father’s death she is left to provide food for her family, which is very difficult considering that they live in the poorest district of Panem.

Once all tributes are chosen for the Hunger Games, they are placed into an arena created by the Capitol and have to overcome a series of obstacles and threats. The game continues until there is only one survivor; that survivor is then flourished with a lifetime of food and a home to live in. This part of the text actually reminded me a lot of Roman mythology, when men would have to fight each other to the death, along with vicious animals such as lions to finish off any survivors, in the Coliseum for the Kings to watch for entertainment. In The Hunger Games, while tributes were in the arena, the Capitol would send in mutated wolves, aggressive monkeys, and other ferocious mutated things to make it even more difficult for survival. Panem, the name of the country where this is taking place, is actually mentioned in a Roman saying “panem et circenses” which I learned translates to “bread and entertainment”; The Capitol exchanged food for entertainment a.k.a The Hunger Games!

Another framework of Mythology about this text is sacrifice. Sacrifices play a major role in mythological literature and as does in this story. An example includes when Katniss volunteers to take her sister’s place in The Hunger Games and also later on in the story, risks her life so that Peta, the male tribute from her District, can live and bring back the wealth to their District because she felt he deserved it more than she did.

One more illusion of mythology that are related to The Hunger Games was Greek mythology. Specifically the story of Theseus and the Labyrinth. After watching The Hunger Games for the 10th time, I was wondering why the plot seems so familiar then I remembered the main point of this myth. In Athens, every nine years seven maidens and seven youths would be sent to confront a Minotaur that once killed someone’s son and made them extremely angry which is why this was sentenced in the first place. Suzanne Collin, the author of The Hunger Games, even confirmed in an interview that this myth is where she got a lot of her great ideas for the book.