I’m working on a longish post about the structures of The Hunger Games, their nine parts, their three books, and the series taken as a whole, so I apologize for the relative fluff I’ve been posting in our month of Panem Pandemonium here at Hogwarts Professor. The better stuff takes longer to write, as you’d guess.
In anticipation of that writing, though, and as something of an apology for my neglect, here are links to writers that are doing some heavier lifting or just fun writing about Hunger Games as literature and transformative experience:
From WhoAreTheBrittons.com: Searching for Identity, Finding Love: The Center of The Hunger Games I don’t always or often agree with the points made but the writer is really stretching to get at why we love these stories, however enmeshed the arguments are in the narrative line.
From A. T. Ross, friend of this blog, and Christian Story-Weaver: The Girl Who Was on Fire Really challenging and thoughtful exegesis of the alchemical markers and spiritual content in these books.
And from Holley Maher: The Embarrassing Side Effects of Having Recently Read “The Hunger Games” Because you needed a laugh about how much we love these books and the stories they tell us about what we are and want to become.
If you want a review of the best HogPro posts about Hunger Games, of course, you can go here. Hat tip to the Brittons for the links and to Holley Maher for the graphic!
I won’t dignify my posts as articles (they were spare time projects on my blog, not as refined as I’d like) so thanks for the mention! Pop literature is worth engaging thoughtfully, and I appreciate the way this site and A.T. Ross do that while encouraging others to do the same. And if you care to respond to my musings, I’d welcome the chance for some creative critique!
I was invited to comment at your site, so I did. Having said already above that I enjoyed and admired your reflections, I want to invite you to consider that its primary failing is in the restriction of the allegorical interpretation. Tolkien famously said that “all stories are about the Fall” and Hunger Games is not an especially obscure example of this.
Katniss, to play dot to dot for a moment, is the soul, our souls really, as Americans treasuring the twin delusions of individualism and independence. Gale is her second self or body, in which she has her worldly identity. Prim is the primrose, the white flower of four petals extending from a golden center, an icon of creation’s four elements and directions from its Origin. Peeta is the Christ, the sacramental bread and unconditional love, who is destroyed by the world but lives on insomuch as we incarnate His love ourselves (however broken he must seem; I’m curious if this isn’t Collins’ commentary on the Catholic church today or just a re-telling of the ‘Wrinkle in Time’ finale…).
The novels are an alchemical morality tale when understood in light of these character-transparencies, through which we enter into and experience the transformation of loving heart choosing to sacrifice herself in love of the Primrose, through the purgation of her trials in a world consumed by everything but sacrificial love (in which the Rose’s scent is used to mask the blood and poison, not to mention a world determined to destroy the Primrose), to her illumination and Self-perfection/ self-destruction in Christ as Mockingjay-Phoenix-Flamemutt. We return to the Meadow, the Garden, Paradise, and Refuge of District 12, when it has become a graveyard and, in that, place of life and play.
And we turn from the World through art, literature for us, just as Peeta calls Katniss to do on the rooftop in the first book and they both do in their three Games. I believe you are right in putting your finger on this scene but miss the greater meaning because you stop yourself from looking all the way through the transparencies to their much greater Referents.
Thank you for the invitation to drop by your site and to spew my thoughts there!