Dystopia In The Hunger Games

“’I volunteer!!’ I gasp. ‘I volunteer as tribute!’” These famous words from Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games have done nothing less than inspired a generation of readers with tales of wonderfully horrible, eerily realistic, soul-crushing, heart-pounding adventure. It is a story of rebellion, romance, and most importantly, of societal discord. The futuristic world of Panem is but one of many similar settings that has exploded into the literary market: the archetypal dystopian society. The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Uglies, Divergent, Matched, to name just a few series, are a mere trifle of the many young adult dystopian novels that flooded bookstores in just the past two decades.
Dystopia itself is not by any means an unfamiliar face in the world of literature. Some of the earliest inklings of dystopian societies can be found in H.G. Wells’s book The Time Machine (1895). The future society the Time Traveller visits in 802,701 A.D. depicts a world where social
In The Giver, a young adult protagonist is given the responsibility of inheriting all of society’s memories from before the world became colorless, emotionless, and seemingly utopian. It is reportedly the first well-known piece of dystopian literature to have such a focus, and Lois Lowry herself is said to be honored to have started the fad that would encompass many of the other well-known contemporary series in the twenty-first century (Artifice). Many dystopian novels have developed common thematic elements, such as apparent or false utopia, romance, oppression in the form of government, media censorship, social stratification – the list goes on (Scholes 2-3) (Spisak). However, it is the unique perspective that teenagers, as still-maturing adults, have on the world that has both grown the popularity and become a key facet of the