Reading in Public No. 28: 5 thoughts on rereading The Hunger Games

Recently I shared that one of my intentions for 2024 is to devote some time to rereading. Studying literature and teaching English required me to revisit many books over the course of my reading life—some that I gladly returned to again and again, and others that I met with an unwilling grimace each time I picked it up. But whether it was a book I loved or one I deeply struggled with, I always got something from my rereading experiences.

This year, to mark ten years of FictionMatters, I’m assigning myself the task of rereading a series of books in an intentional and deliberate manner. I want to return to these books to look at with fresh eyes and share what I find with all of you. Some will be books I read ages ago, others will be more recent reads that merit a second look.

In considering how I want to share my thinking about these books, I have decided (for now!) to craft essays as part of my Tuesday Reading in Public series. These rereads/rethinks really fit squarely into the project of Reading in Public, which is to share how I read in addition to what I read. This is also an opportunity for me to practice more rigorous and in-depth criticism in addition to the brief reviews I share in my Sunday newsletters.

These essays will remain free for all subscribers, however, they are the most time-consuming type of newsletters I’m currently creating. If you are so inclined, please consider supporting this work by upgrading to a paid subscription or donating at my Buy Me a Coffee page. Thanks so much for being here and reading my thoughts!

Some time during the height of the pandemic, my husband and I tried to watch the first Hunger Games movie. We’d been on a kick of finding action-packed film franchises we could consume like potato chips night after night on our couch. We’d watched all the Jurassic Park, Alien, and Da Vinci Code (yes, you read that right) movies and The Hunger Games seemed like a great next pick. I can’t remember if I was pregnant at the time or if our daughter was a newborn, but as new or soon-to-be-parents, we found the film unwatchable. Kids killing kids! It was so depressing that I couldn’t believe we had all fawned over it as fun entertainment.

But when it was suggested to me that I reread this as a book to keep me up all night, I was intrigued. I’d already planned to commence a rereading project and beginning with a book that I’d read just for fun, before I ever considered reviewing books publicly seemed like an interesting place to start.

I read The Hunger Games in my first or second year after college and ended up completely binging the series in a matter of days. I was utterly captivated by the world Suzanne Collins created and the fate of Katniss Everdeen—a character both undeniably special and yet still bland enough for nearly any teenage girl reading to project herself onto. I was reminded with these books that after years of meticulously studying the craft of master writers across centuries, that gripping popular fiction still existed and was a delight to discover.

Yet while this is a series that reminded me that I enjoyed reading outside the realm of literary analysis, but it went on to become an important story for my analytical practice as well. Because it was so widely read (or watched), The Hunger Games served as an example text when I taught critical theory to my high school juniors and I spent years talking about how one could view this series through a feminist, Marxist, or psychoanalytic lens. I knew, therefor, that this world was ripe for literary analysis, but I never considered revisiting it until now.

And, let me tell you, this book holds up. Even knowing how the first book ended, I couldn’t stop reading. Suzanne Collins writes a masterful cliffhanger, and I one-more-chapter’d my way through some glorious late-night reading. I also think this series could become a classic. It says so much about the time period in which it gained popularity, but also offers the opportunity for open and accessible interpretation. I’ll be fascinated to see if this is a book that teens still pick up in ten years or if it will be brought into classrooms of the future.

Until then, here are five thoughts on rereading The Hunger Games…

1. The name game.

It’s pretty obvious that Suzanne Collins is into allusions and has carefully chosen the names of her characters. Yes, slightly weird names are a convention of fantasy and sci-fi because they’re an easy way to give your reader that feeling of “otherness” that’s so important to the genre. But Collins’ naming conventions are doing something more. Much has been written about this so I won’t go into everything, but on this read, I was (of course) struck by the literary allusions. particularly that of our heroine. With how much attention Collins gave to her names, Katniss’s last name Everdeen has to be a play on another female literary heroine, Bathsheba Everdene from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. Though unusual for the time, Bathsheba is the primary caretaker for the land she inherits and manages to keep things afloat through grit, determination, and knowing who to rely on. And much like Bathsheba, Katniss is fiercely independent, though her story comes to revolve largely around the romantic entanglements she has with multiple men in her life. It almost feels as though Collins is acknowledging that much like within the landscape of Victorian fiction in which a marriage plot was the only plot available to literary heroines, the young adult realm demands a love story angle, even if that is not the primary intention of the novel. I like this reading for myself because the love triangle is the one part of the story that irked me on my reread. It felt forced, and maybe naming her heroine “Everdeen” is a reminder that women’s stories have long been forced into the mold of a romantic trajectory. And without getting into spoilers, the way both Bathsheba’s and Katniss’s love stories conclude have a lot in common and perhaps support the idea that the romance was a Trojan horse all along.

Bathsheba Everdene and Katniss Everdeen.

2. That mockingjay speaks volumes

To me, the mockingjay is one of the most interesting motifs in all of literature. Truly! What begins as something relatively minor in book one becomes the symbol of the entire franchise by the time we arrive at the final book and its two-part film adaptation. What’s interested me from the beginning is that the mockingjay becomes a stand-in for Katniss herself and symbolizes the very idea of revolution.

Katniss as the Mockingjay.

But this requires a closer reading. Because if the mockingjay represents revolution, we need to examine what Collins tells us about these strange little birds to begin with. Collins describes the birds as the result of cross-breeding between the Capitol’s genetically modified jabber-jays and naturally existing mockingbirds. I mean…that in and of itself is a real trip! The idea that revolution itself is the offspring of those in power, not as a result of conflict but of reproduction is not a particularly glamorous view of the revolutionary ideal. This already hints that Collins’ views on revolution are more complicated than the story itself suggests and then she gives us this:

[The mockingjays] had lost the ability to enunciate words but could still mimic a range of human vocal sounds, from a child’s high-pitched warble to a man’s deep tones. And they could re-create songs. Not just a few notes, but whole songs with multiple verses, if you had the patience to sing them and if they liked your voice.

There’s something lovely in here about revolution belonging to everyone from children to grown men, but my biggest takeaway is the emphasis on mimicry. If the mockingjay—the ultimate symbol of revolution—is a mimic, does real revolution exist? Or does revolution merely reproduce the existing power systems in a shiny new form? On my most recent read, these questions struck me even harder when I was reminded that it’s Madge (not Prim!), the daughter of the mayor in Katniss’s District 12 town, who gives Katniss her mockingjay pin, linking her with the symbol for the first time. This means it’s someone aligned with political power who bestows this moniker on our protagonist, further complicating everything the books come to depict about resistance and revolution.

3. The Hunger Games predicted a decade’s worth of the entertainment industry.

The Hunger Games was published in September of 2008 during a boom in reality television which no doubt influenced Collins’ work. But what strikes me now is that while reality competitions like Survivor, The Bachelor, American Idol, and American Gladiator were extremely popular, there wasn’t nearly as much drama-filled real-life exposé sort of programming as we have now. Of course The Real World had been around, but the sociological experiment that is The Real Housewives wouldn’t premier until the following year. Furthermore, Serial—the podcast credited with ushering in a new era of true crime—wouldn’t come out until 2014. While The Hunger Games isn’t steeped in true crime tropes in the same way it’s tackling reality TV, it does deal explicitly with murder as entertainment. Between it’s understanding that human drama is the most interesting voyeuristic viewing, a clear-eyed view of the coaching that happens in reality TV, and a morbid acceptance that humans are fascinated by the grim and the gruesome, The Hunger Games is an incredibly prescient depiction of what would become the decades-long fascinations of the entertainment industry.

4. The rise and fall of the young adult market

Reading this incredible book while the book industry is announcing the death of the young adult market was a pretty surreal experience. Young adult fiction didn’t exist when I was a young adult reader. The way the Harry Potter series grew in maturity along with its readers is the closest thing I came to experiencing that world and I had aged out of the market by the time Twilight and The Hunger Games came along. The discourse around the current decline in the market is that it’s largely due to a lack of shelf space in bookstores. I am not an expert in book marketing or book selling, but I find that explanation completely bizarre and rather simplistic. My own observation as a former teacher of teen readers and very occasional reader of YA is that these series became heavily commodified after the franchise success of a few standouts. This seems to have lead to YA books that are highly derivative and while there is always some comfort in tried and true narratives, most readers also yearn for novelty. Maybe we’ll soon be in store for a market-shaking, totally original YA book like The Hunger Games was for its time, and the YA rollercoaster will once again swing up.

5. Will we ever be ready for dystopian fiction again?

The extreme success of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All-Stars means that in no way can I claim that dystopian fiction is out. But doesn’t it kind of feel like dystopian fiction is out? The success of this genre across marketing sectors was undeniable for years. There were dystopian hits that were YA, commercial, and literary alike, and it seemed like all marketers had to do was put the term in the cover copy to garner a flurry of interest around any book. While there are still some fantastic pieces of dystopian fiction that rise to the top of each publishing, I don’t think that label guarantees success like it once did. I’ve heard many readers express a reluctance to return to dystopian fiction in spite of having once loved it. Furthermore, readers of color have been pointing out for years that most dystopian fiction is using historical atrocities that white people have perpetrated against people of color and putting white characters into those same situations. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (which remains one of my favorite books) is absolutely guilty of this, a truth she admits with pride in the author’s note following the anniversary edition of the book. This discourse and the reticence many readers feel towards the genre makes me wonder if we will ever be ready for another boom in dystopian fiction, and, if so, what social, political, and artistic conditions will be necessary to usher that in.

Final Thoughts

Upon my rereading of The Hunger Games, I came across an announcement that the books will be rereleased in new editions featuring gorgeous illustrations by Nico Delort. This news combined with the success of the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes prequel film only confirms my suspicion that this series, among all the dystopias and all the blockbuster YA, may indeed become a classic. This is a rich text filled with social commentary that may be much more nuanced than a first read suggests.

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-Sara