Dehumanization in 'The Hunger Games'
What the Book Teaches Us About How We Treat Animals
“I will not cry out, I will die, in my own small way, undefeated.”
Ever since first hearing about The Hunger Games at a middle school book fair, I’ve wondered about the title. Why hunger, specifically? It’s only now, seventeen years after the first book’s release, that I understand.
In a dystopian future America, now called Panem, an authoritarian regime has settled in a city called the Capitol. Twelve districts lie beyond its borders. The chasm between the Capitol elite and the district destitute is reinforced every year on the Reaping, when a boy and girl from each district are selected to enter the Hunger Games where they will all fight to the death until only one remains. When Katniss Everdeen’s sister is selected for the Games, she volunteers to enter in her place.
The author, Suzanne Collins, draws overt parallels between the people of the districts and animals. The tributes sent into the arena are the food that satiates the Capitol’s hunger for dominion over its people. These children are also hungry, both literally and metaphorically. Starved all their lives, they get a taste of decadence before entering the arena, fattened up before the slaughter. But they are also hungry to survive, and even the most docile children can become bloodthirsty when it’s either hunt or be hunted.
The Hunger Games is a masterclass in depicting how authoritarian regimes dehumanize their subjects. But the very nature of dehumanization—treating humans as if they weren’t human—shows us the stark reality of how animals are treated. By examining how the Capitol manipulates images, actions, language, health, and thoughts, I hope to show the associations between the Capitol’s control over people and humans’ control over animals.
Control Over Image
The story begins in District 12, the coal mining district, before moving to the Capitol. Black dust coats everything in 12, maintaining a drab, literally colorless existence. This image then juxtaposes with the Capitol, where people dye their hair and skin all sorts of colors, wear vibrant clothes and accessories, and even consume lurid foods and drinks.
Upon entering the Capitol, the tributes first head to the Remake Center—“which is essentially a gigantic stable”—and are reshaped to look more like the people of the Capitol. Katniss’s stylists are described as looking “like a trio of oddly colored birds” who leave her “plucked like a bird, ready for roasting.” Two very different kinds of birds are called to mind with these similes: one, bright and admired, the other, naked and edible. Katniss expects her head stylist, Cinna, to also look at her like “a piece of meat to be prepared for a platter,” and is therefore surprised when he sees and treats her like a person. How often can humans say the same about the animals on their plates?
Cinna dresses Katniss in a sleek black outfit that burns with fake fire, a different kind of vibrance than the Capitol wants from its tributes. Her color blooms from an organic darkness, from the dirt and grime of District 12 rather than the Capitol’s bedazzled artifice. And it’s dangerous, threatening to the Capitol’s power. When she and Peeta hold hands during their official entrance into the Capitol—a “perfect touch of rebellion”—the Capitol’s control over them is threatened.
Image is more than just how something looks; it’s about how it makes people feel. Effie Trinket, the Capitol escort for District 12’s tributes, believes the Capitol to be civilized and sophisticated compared to 12’s “barbarism,” and it’s that very misconception that keeps the Capitol in power. It shows the districts that the Capitol, with its beauty and gluttony, is different than the districts, better than them. And any true rebellion would be swiftly squashed. But Katniss’s unintentional crusade against the Capitol shows just how easily that power can topple. President Snow admits as much to her at the beginning of the sequel:
“Whatever problems anyone may have with the Capitol, believe me when I say that if it released its grip on the districts for even a short time, the entire system would collapse.”
In the real world, we use certain kinds of images for certain kinds of animals. Like Katniss, animals on farms live and die in dismal, dirty places, but the only way most people are willing to interact with those animals is after they’ve been transformed into something more palatable. Under the bright lights in the grocery store, we may see regal silhouettes of cows in a pasture on beef packages, or read terms like “cage-free” and imagine lush green fields where chickens roam freely. In a dazzling circus tent, we see only a compliant lion leaping through a flaming hoop. Shopping for a down-stuffed mattress or couch or coat, we recall childhood memories of plucking feathers from the ground and brushing the smooth quills across our skin.
Though most of us never see beyond these fictional images conjured by successful marketing campaigns, we know on some level that it’s a façade. Yet we actively resist seeing the truth, shrieking “Don’t show me! I don’t want to see!” when confronted with images different from the ones in our heads.
It’s only when we start thinking like the oppressed rather than the oppressor that we realize just how little realism there is in such fabrications.
Control Over Actions
The Capitol’s control over their people’s actions is the most obvious form of control: They rule with an iron fist over the districts and force district children to kill each other. But it’s only because of their unyielding dominion over Katniss’s life that they transformed her into the kind of warrior that could defeat them.
Like a farm or prison, an electric fence surrounds District 12, though it’s rarely afforded the power to stay electrified. The Capitol’s lax enforcement with its most impoverished district gives Katniss access to the world beyond the Capitol’s enforcement. Outside 12, she can freely express her true feelings about them and can forage and hunt to keep her family fed. The knowledge she picks up outside the district keeps her alive in the Games.
Before leaving for the Capitol, her best friend, Gale, tells her that “it’s just hunting”:
“‘You know how to kill.’
“‘Not people,’ I say.
“‘How different can it be, really?’ says Gale grimly.”
And it isn’t different, not to the Capitol. In addition to the human tributes, the arena is full of other animals for them to hunt and eat. These nonhuman beings aren’t considered real victims of the Games, but in erecting the arena, the Capitol chose to fill it with prey animals, all but requiring the tributes to eat them to save themselves. It’s kill or be killed, and you’re either predator or prey in Panem.
Control Over Language
Before entering the arena, the tributes’ last stop in the Capitol is the Launch Room, though “it’s referred to as the Stockyard. The place animals go before slaughter.” Tributes begin in the stables of the Remake Center, a place of birth and life, before ending their journey at the Stockyard, a place of imminent death. The tributes are literally live stock, their worth measured by how much enjoyment their deaths provide Capitol citizens.
But what happens in the arena can’t be called murder, even Katniss knows this as she nears victory:
“But no one will understand my sorrow at Thresh’s murder. The word pulls me up short. Murder! Thankfully, I didn’t say it aloud. That’s not going to win me any points in the arena.”
The Capitol must have control over the kind of language people use to speak of the Games. It cannot be called what it is. Only acceptable are silly euphemisms that conceal the horrors of reality.
Katniss must use her words wisely, lest the Capitol retaliate. After shooting down a boy in the arena, she realizes he was her “first kill.” She thinks, “Numerous animals have lost their lives at my hands, but only one human,” before recalling Gale’s “How different can it be, really?” She realizes that the killing itself isn’t, though the aftermath is. She sees animals the same way the Capitol sees tributes: bodies to use. Of course, Katniss learns to think this way about animals out of necessity, while the Capitol does so for fun:
“[T]he Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event.”
Control Over Health
As is typical of dystopian novels, Panem’s masses live in poverty while the powerful live in luxury. The advanced technology available in the Capitol and the Games contrasts starkly with the lack of technology in District 12. Katniss helpfully informs readers that America fell because of climate catastrophes, so the reliance on coal—one of the dirtiest and least efficient power sources—seems to be a way of keeping the people of the districts sick and preoccupied. Rather than offering all their citizens solar, nuclear, or hydropower, District 12’s men toil away in mines and die underground, while their wives and daughters inhale black dust, coating their lungs, killing them slowly. The lack of food and proper medicine keeps them weak, unable to fight back, unable to think of anything beyond mere survival.
Life isn’t much different in the arena. The Capitol has complete control of the land and the elements. A fire thrusts Katniss into the Careers’1 path, and fireballs hurl toward her out of the flames. The message is clear: the Capitol wants her dead. When only a handful of tributes remain, the Gamemakers drain the streams, funneling the kids together for one final battle.
To an outside observer, it seems irrational for the Capitol to keep its fighters weak. After all, about half the tributes die on the first day, the strongest immediately picking off the weakest. Why not draw it out more, make it a good show? But the Games aren’t about the killing; it’s all about power. Like agriculture corporations, the Capitol gives the districts only the bare minimum, wanting to squeeze as much from them as possible. Animals on farms often have an abundance of food, but only so they can fatten up quickly. Their bodies have been altered through decades of artificial selection to grow faster, prioritizing hefty breasts or large udders. Even if they’re “non-GMO,” no animal on a farm today would exist under natural circumstances. Despite popping antibiotics with every meal, that’s done nothing to prevent or stall the ongoing bird flu epidemic. The profit losses from culling whole barns of birds is a price worth paying when compared to the untenable cost of keeping chickens (relatively) healthy and cared for.
Control Over Thoughts
In many ways, Katniss thinks like the people of the Capitol by removing the individuality from each animal she kills. At one point she thinks of “the meat I’d shot,” as if the animal were just a walking piece of food waiting for her arrow. When she thinks of the Career boy as her “first kill,” the Capitol’s quest of dehumanizing the tributes succeeds. He’s no longer a person, just a body. The Capitol controls images, actions, language, and health with the goal of controlling thoughts. Because if the people of the districts are too sick and downtrodden to even consider a rebellion, then the Capitol can retain power for another day.
But to conclude, I want to go back to the very first page of the book. Katniss and her sister Primrose are both named after plants, the former a hearty tuber and the latter a delicate flower. This obviously represents their differing personalities. Katniss is stoic, Prim is sensitive—yet both are strong. Prim names her cat Buttercup because his eyes resemble the flower, but Katniss calls him “the world’s ugliest cat” with “eyes the color of rotting squash.” Where Prim sees a unique, worthy individual, Katniss sees only “another mouth to feed.”
The Capitol robbed a younger Katniss of her childhood, forcing her out into the forest to hunt to survive, earning Prim a relatively sheltered adolescence in which meat was brought to her, dead and ready to eat. Prim adores animals and can’t bear to see them hurt while Katniss takes the more pragmatic approach of killing them to survive. Though Katniss’s experience hunting animals ultimately saves her life, I wonder how different a girl she might’ve been had she not been forced to shield her heart against animals, if she’d been permitted a kinder childhood, one in which her innate empathy blossomed and she could love animals in the same innocent way as her sister.
A Modern Dystopia
Once you realize the tributes are stand-ins for animals, it’s impossible to miss how Haymitch prods Katniss and Peeta “like animals at times, checking our muscles,” or how Peeta’s “eyes show the alarm I’ve seen so often in prey,” or how the people of the Capitol love seeing the tributes trot around like “trained dog[s].” The Capitol wants to root for the special tribute, the animal that escapes the slaughterhouse to live out their days on a sanctuary—as long as all the other animals meet the knife instead.
When we recognize this connection between fiction and nonfiction, we realize many animals are already living in a similar kind of dystopia.
On my mind: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Dystopias never go out of style. When I read dystopian fiction, I can’t help but think of the real world. (That’s kind of the point.) How would we know if our country had turned into a dictatorship? By the time we realized it, would it be too late?
I recently read Ray Bradbury’s classic, and if I had any questions regarding whether or not we were sliding toward dystopia, that affirmed my fears. Anyone who attacks centers of learning or tries to prohibit certain kinds of stories does not have our best interests at heart. Controlling the way people think and act is not a hallmark of a free society. It’s a method of oppression. Stories create and reflect culture; we use them to learn and grow, to progress. It’s only through conflict that protagonists can change and emerge from the plot victorious, but they have to be willing to stand up to the villains threatening them first.
Stories teach us how to rebel, resist, and reform. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you.
Careers = the kids who train all their lives and eagerly volunteer to enter the arena
Thanks for covering this! I recently read the prequel and had the exact same epiphany. The people from the capital kept referring to the tributes’ ‘claws’.