The main characters in this book are Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, teenagers from District 12, who have been chosen to represent their district among the teenagers from
the remaining eleven districts. This is their first time entering the Capitol, and they are amazed at the contrast between their sad predicament back home with the lavish lifestyle
people in the Capitol seem to have. Before they enter the arena where they are to fight for their lives, they are introduced to the lifestyle that is strikingly different than the one they
have in their hometown. The Capitol, being where the rich and the government reside, illustrates how unfair
the Capitol is toward their neighboring districts. Each district provides specific or special products, from jewelry to lumber to power to coal, that are mass-produced in the respective
districts; yet the only ones who are able to enjoy these products are the Capitol residents. The citizens of the twelve
districts work tirelessly each day to please the Capitol’s needs, yet the ones who work for these products are only given a small amount of money for what they
produce. To add to their poor living conditions, due to their limited supplies, daily necessities are bought by trading other goods. If a person does not have meaningful goods to trade, they
will not get the amount of food supply that they need. Yet, having goods to trade does not guarantee its value will amount to a good trade.
During the Hunger Games event itself, the tributes battle each other for survival. The people in the Capitol and the districts watch on the live telecast as the tributes struggle with
the hardships of the Games. Throughout this event, people in the Capitol, especially the rich, are determining factors whether the tributes can remain alive or not. Besides the betting that
happens between the people in the Capitol on who will win, the ones who can afford food, medicine, or other helpful objects and can send them to their favorite tributes. Though the
game’s conditions are harsh and wild, the winner will be the one who is able to remain standing after 23 other tributes die in the playing field.
Miraculously, Katniss and Peeta are two of the last three tributes left standing in the end of the Games. After fighting another tribute from a different district, these District 12
children are left to wonder which of them should remain alive. Because they both feel it is unfair to have just one winner, they decide to eat poisonous berries to voluntarily end their
lives. As they are about to eat the berries, the Games officials announced they will have two winners, to avoid having no winners at all. This is a different ending than what the Capitol
officials intended and different from the previous results of the Games. Here, Katniss and Peeta have succeeded in steering from the norm, which can be seen to be rebellious.
3. Theory
A school of thought founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Marxist perspective, professes that different socioeconomic classes have more powerful effects in
dividing people compared to differences in religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, or gender Tyson 54. To that extent, Marxist critics believe that economic power is the root of all social and
political activities within a society. Critics of Marxism seek to investigate how those in power within a society use each method of their government system to hide the unfairness in their
“socioeconomic arrangement” and the repercussions that this unfairness has towards the less fortunate Cain, Finke, and Johnson 762. Therefore, another aim of Marxism is to bring to
the surface the ideologies that hinder us from seeing the reality of the class struggle beyond what is visible to us
by “interpret[ing] text according to its relevance with the class struggle” “History Marxist Criticism”. Furthermore, Marxist critics have created a model of the kind
of society they see, which includes “a base the material means of production, distribution, and exchange and a superstructure,
the ‘cultural’ world of ideas, art, religion, law, and so on” Barry 157. The base of this society represents how money affects how everything is
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run. As a result, every part of society - from its social, political, and ideological standpoint - exists or remains standing only because of money.
Moreover, Marxism classifies two kinds of social classes: “the
bourgeoisie
—those who control the world’s natural, economic, and human resources—and the
proletariat,
the majority of the global population who live in substandard conditions and who have always
performed the manual labor” Tyson 54. The bourgeoisie are the rich and powerful, the controllers of a society. In contrast, the proletariats are the subordinate - poor citizens who
live in oppressed situations under the ruling of their powerful government. Because of the presence of two differing socioeconomic classes, there are bound to be conflicts between the
rich and the poor as class struggle becomes visible. Barry states that “Marxism sees progress
as coming about through the struggle for power between different social classes” 156. Class struggle is a big part of history because it is driven by the competition for the social,
economic, and political advantage – the superstructure of every society.
The system in which a society works is heavily influenced by a notion of ideas called ideologies. Within Marxism, there are certain ideologies, which according to Althusser,
“represent the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” 18. People in capitalistic societies may see that their way of seeing themselves and the world they
live in as something natural, when in fact it is not. According to Bertens, ideology blurs the line between whether or not society acts on their own will or their actions are caused by the
system 86. Furthermore, ideology also deems what the society thinks is the norm or valuable. It is imperative to not overlook the ideologies within a tex
t that show the “absences – the ‘
not-said
’ of the work and certain ‘definite forms of social consciousness’” Eagleton 555. For this reason, in this analysis, I will focus on three interconnected ideologies of
Marxism- false consciousness, hegemony, and reification- to further explain how the lower Rimun 7
