The Hunger Games: An Analysis

The question of agency is one which is particularly loaded, not because its definition lacks of clarity, but rather because it is not a notion which can be simplified into arguing whether or not a character has agency. More often than not, a character is not entirely free to make whatever decision and act however they see fit, nor are they wholly prohibited from doing such things. Usually, they are free to act within the restriction imposed onto them by their society, and so the question shifts from “do they have agency?” to “how much agency do they have?”. Political philosopher Isaiah Berlin refers to this particular situation as negative liberalism, which describes the amount to which an individual is free to make their own decisions without
interference (Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”). Due to the didactic nature of children’s literature, this concept is quite frequent here, so that, from a young age, the next generation is indoctrinated to understand that, just like the protagonists of the stories they read, they are free to act as they see fit, so long as their decisions fit within the rules of the society in which they live. Both The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s Alice provide excellent examples of such characters, something which can be seen in the assumptions they make about the worlds around them and their actions throughout their stories. In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, often appears to make very clear, very quick assumptions as a means of assessing situations as immediately as she can. One of the first moments in which this frame of mind is clear is when she is arriving into the Capitol on the train with Peeta. During the journey to the Capitol, Katniss decided that she could bring herself to trust Peeta, but within one statement which suggested that he was trying to earn sponsors, she automatically switches her opinion back to a certitude that he is playing the game as much as he can and, therefore, that “the boy who gave [her] the bread, is fighting hard to [kill her]”. (Collins, 60). This is but one of many examples in which her zero sum mentality (O’Flynn, Siobhan) comes out to suggest that Katniss has a difficulty seeing shades of grey in social interactions. Though this way of thinking was most likely useful when she hunted, her survivor’s instinct kicked in to sway her towards the Capitol-created belief that in the Hunger Games, there is no choice but to kill or be killed. In the text, however, there is in fact evidence that this may not necessarily be the case, and that there is room for mercy within the Games. During the Feast, for example, when Katniss is about to be killed by Clove, she is saved by Thresh. Even then, she expects that the best for which she can hope is that “he won’t choose a slow, sadistic end for [her]” (Collins, 287), but much to Katniss’ surprise, he decides to let her go “just this one time… for the little girl” (288). In this moment, Thresh exemplifies that killing is not the only option in the Games and that there is in fact a choice to be made, effectively throwing a wrench into the Capitol’s logic. There are, of course, moments in which Katniss acts outside of her own zero sum beliefs: when she takes on Rue as an ally, and when she goes to search Peeta. Both of these, however, cannot be said to be moments where she has truly changed her way of thinking. In the first case, while she is allied with Rue, she is frequently thinking “about Rue being killed” (213) or “about Rue not being killed and the two of [them] being left for last” (213). Though she has decided to team up with Rue, she is still well aware that their lives exist in an either/or scenario, and does not appear to shy away from such thoughts. Similarly, when Katniss goes off in search of Peeta, she doesn’t do so until the rules by which she has been told to play are changed and “two tributes can win this year” (244). Even then, however, the first thing she tells herself about taking him on as an ally is that “if [she] was watching [she]’d loathe any tribute who didn’t immediately ally with their district partner” (247) and that “it’s an absolute requirement if [she] want[s] any more help from sympathetic sponsors” (247). Although in both these scenarios, the way in which she is behaving suggests that she no longer adheres to the notion of a zero sum game, the way in which she thinks about these actions show that her mind does not seem to have changed. Perhaps the most evident assumption made by Katniss, however, is the one she makes where the Avox girl is concerned: that, because Katniss was unable to help her, the Avox must hate her. In fact, she even goes as far as to “wonder if she’ll enjoy watching [her] die” (Collins, 85). This simple interaction is a perfect example of how the Capitol seems to remove itself from the equation, turning a situation caused by their power into one which Katniss believed to be fuelled by her own lack of power. It shows that, in her subconscious, blaming the Capitol is not even an option because it is so averse to the rules. Even more impressive, perhaps, is the way in which the Capitol manages to turn each tribute into simplified versions of themselves, dehumanizing them in the process.
When Peeta says that he wants to show that he’s “more than just a piece in their Games” (Collins, 142) he hints at a concept which completely escapes Katniss: that, much like different pieces in chess have different abilities, the tributes in the Hunger Games each have unique roles which they are meant to perform. After Peeta announces his alleged love for her, in order to calm her, Haymitch tells her that “Now [he] can say [she’s] a heartbreaker” (135). That being said, he doesn’t actually refer to her as a heartbreaker, which supports the notion that it is more important for her to appear a certain way than to actually fit the role, because what matters is not what she is but who they can project onto her. Another example of this is Glimmer, the girl from One, who is described by Katniss as being “sexy all the way” (125). In fact, Katniss goes as far as to say that “You can tell her mentor didn’t have any trouble coming up with an angle for her” (125). Despite this, however, it often seems as though Katniss herself is completely oblivious to the fact that many of her fellow tributes are performing in their roles. Though she is clearly aware of Glimmer’s performance and later on states that “everyone seems to be playing up some angle” (125), referring to Foxface as “sly and elusive” (125) and Cato as “a
ruthless killing machine” (125), she often appears to have a difficult time making a distinction between her fellow tributes’ roles and their actual personalities, particularly when the Careers are involved, whom she describes as “overly vicious, arrogant, better fed, but only because they’re the Capitol’s lapdogs” (161), painting each and every one of them with the same brush, failing to put any sort of distinction between them. Even Peeta, when Katniss finds out that he is with the Careers, is given no mercy, prompting Katniss to immediately “imagine the things they’re saying about him back home now” (162) and to think that he “had the gall to talk to [her] about disgrace” (162). Although she has no idea why Peeta is in the position in which she finds him, she automatically buys into the “us against them” mentality which the Capitol the encourages districts and social classes to have towards each other, something which is also portrayed to be done by tesserae when we see Gale’s displeasure of Madge and Katniss acknowledges that it’s easy to see why “someone like Madge, who has never been at risk of needing a tessera, can set him off” (13). This is one of the key ways in which the Capitol seems to pin the citizens of Panem against each other in order to avoid scrutiny. While Katniss’ agency is impacted by the tightly-knit social structure of the Capitol in The Hunger Games, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland finds its protagonist’s free will complicated not by one set of customs and rules, but two. Perhaps the less evident of the two, though equally as present, is Alice’s attempt at maintaining her own Victorian social expectations throughout the text. When she arrives to the Mad Hatter’s tea party, for example, she finds that the customs of the society from which she comes seem to be turned upside down, and that the other guests at the tea party act in ways which “[aren’t] very civil” (Carroll, 53) or even “very rude” (54). She is, within the first two pages, offered wine even though there is none, and told that her hair needs cutting. Both of these comments would of course be considered to be quite rude within the context of a Victorian tea party, and so Alice winds up being quite taken aback by them. Even more perplexing to her, however, is that the Hatter would not “do something better with the time… than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers” (56). Again, this is something which would be completely ludicrous in a Victorian environment, causing a frustration to grow within Alice which seems to come closer to its peak bit by bit as the tea party grows more absurd with situations such as their changing of seats so the Hatter receives a new cup, even though none of the others do. This frustration, in fact, resurges during the trial at the end of the book, which once again is most definitely unconventional. The evidence, for example, is described as not having “an atom of meaning in it” (100), and the sentence is pronounced before the verdict, which Alice states to be “Stuff and nonsense” (102) before knocking over all the cards of the court, once again showing the growth of the frustration she feels when events fail to match the expectations of Victorian society. Throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, one of the main storylines is that of Alice trying to follow along with the constantly-expanding rules of the new world in which she finds herself. When she is made to grow and shrink by the cakes, mushrooms, and potions she finds along her journey, the way in which Wonderland is set up is in fact modifying both Alice’s role and her capacity to act as she sees fit, limiting her agency. Despite this, however, she is capable of choosing when she does change and when she does not, be it by “dropping [the fan] hastily, just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether” (Carroll, 12) or by carrying a mushroom of which “one side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter” (38). The mushroom is particularly significant as it shows that, Alice grows to be more aware of the rules of Wonderland, she can actually use them in order to reclaim her agency and actually decide when she is changed by the world around her. It is not only her changing size, however, which affects Alice’s agency, but also the characters she interacts along the way, each of which with their own idea of who she is meant to be and what she is meant to do. The white rabbit, for example, “[takes her] for his housemaid” (24) and sends her on an errand, which Alice feels as though she cannot turn down, even then she cannot help but to note “How queer it seems… to be going messages for a rabbit!” (25). Similarly, when Alice encounters the Pigeon, it immediately declares her to be a Serpent, claiming that “[she’s] trying to invent something” (40) and that “[she’s] looking for eggs” (41). This time, however, her immediate branding as a threat puts Alice in a position in which she is required to counter the logic of Wonderland and try to undo the identity which has been thrust upon her, having learned enough about the way in which it functions to manipulate it in her favour. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland often seems to deal with adapting to anti-logic and learning how to conform to it and use it, in a way embracing the limits imposed upon her agency by the storyworld. While the rest of this essay has discussed the way in which the rules of their respective storyworlds restricted the agency of both Katniss and Alice, this paragraph will discuss the transcending of those rules. Though Alice’s disobedience does not go much beyond her frustration that the two sets of rules to which she is supposed to adhere do not always fit together, by the end of The Hunger Games, there are moments in which Katniss actively and knowingly disobeys the rules of her society. Without a doubt, the most famous of these moments is after Rue’s death, when Katniss buries her in flowers “to shame [the Capitol], to make them accountable, to show [them] that whatever they do… there is a part of every tribute they can’t own” (Collins, 236-237). In this section it is beyond clear that Katniss has snapped out of the rules and is actively defying the Capitol by telling them that they are not, in fact, all-powerful. Even more impressive, however, is the scene at the end of the book in which Katniss manages to use the rules of her society against it: when she pulls out the nightlock. In this moment, Katniss realizes that “[the Capitol has] to have a victor” (244) or “the whole thing would blow up in the Gamemakers’ faces” (344), and so she uses this rule to challenge the one which states that there can only be one victor. Through this, Katniss commits the ultimate act of defiance by forcing the Capitol to choose a rule to be broken, highlighting a weakness in its social structure. It might seem odd, if we consider children’s literature to be didactic in nature, that while Alice seemingly obeys all the rules of her own society, even if they limit her agency, and expects everyone around her to do the same, that Katniss does not do so.
However, it must be considered that the two texts were written in very different times. While Victorian society often thought of curiosity to be a sin and that rules should be obeyed blindly, one of the goals The Hunger Games is to encourage its readers to question totalitarian authority; it is therefore perfectly natural that the protagonists should reflect the values of each society where their agency is concerned. In this way, the fact that, while both are limited by the rules of their storyworlds, the fact that Katniss Everdeen eventually transcends these rules is an indicator that the society in which it was written is much more progressive than the one in which Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was
created.