[LINK] "Government Violence, Human Nature, and The Hunger Games"

[rfmcdonald]

James Warner's Open Democracy essay "Government Violence, Human Nature, and The Hunger Games" is an essay that takes a look at American writer Suzanne Collins' trilogy The Hunger Games and Koushun Takami's 1999 Battle Royale. These two stories feature children set against each other by their governments, forced to fight to the death for their societies' edification. Warner contens that the brutal conflicts in these two novels reflect a more optimistic view of the human condition than one might find in the earlier Lord of the Flies, say; the earlier novel presumes that bloody conflict is inevitable, while the contemporary novels see conflict as a consequence of decisions made by more powerful outsiders.

In William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a group of boys on an island revert to a “state of nature” in the absence of adult supervision. The book is set during, and is on some level about, World War Two, in which Golding served as a Naval officer – but despite the murderous nature of some key governments in that conflict, the point of Lord of the Flies is that the violence ultimately lies within us. Golding wrote of the ending of the novel, “The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?”

Neither The Hunger Games nor Battle Royale bother with the ominous landscape descriptions Golding gives us in Lord of the Flies, partly because for Takami and Collins the evil is not in our nature, but in our government. For the same reason, few of the contestants in these books succumb to delirium as the boys in Lord of the Flies do – with only a few exceptions, they handle their predicament as rationally as if they were competing in a video game. One sense in which Lord of the Flies may be the darkest of these books, despite its comparatively modest death toll – only two murders – is that so many of its characters go mad. Even Ralph, the most clear-headed survivor in Lord of the Flies, keeps forgetting the boys' long-term goal is to be rescued rather than to thrive as savages, and by the end all the other boys are united in trying to kill Ralph -- whereas Katniss in The Hunger Games and Shuya in Battle Royale succeed against the odds in maintaining healthy alliances and remaining focused on a strategy, and only a few minor characters in those worlds go insane.

Moreover when a character in Battle Royale behaves evilly, Takami always supplies an explanation – this boy was born a sociopath, this girl was abused, most of the kids are just scared to trust each other in case they're taken advantage of – evil is not seen as humanity's default setting as it is in Lord of the Flies. The Hunger Games is less explicit on this ethical question, but the guiding principle of the series seems to be that people are good until power corrupts them. Both Takami and Collins portray the adult world as one of brutal conflict whose rules frustrate our normal instinct to cooperate. For Ralph, after he's been hunted, wildness loses its attraction, but Katniss draws power from nature – hunting in the woods is how she becomes resourceful enough to stand up to authority, and it's significant that even the harmful creatures she encounters there are not naturally occurring species, but mutations artificially engineered by her government.