She asserts, for example, that she would have happily killed the skunk she spotted “strolling through the bushes” had she “a mind to” - and that she could, in fact, happily “kill anyone.” Katniss’s voice, interestingly enough, reads infinitely more clinical and detached than Junior’s does; it suggests that although she, like him, has seen a great deal of violence, what she has seen has been so affecting that it has, in fact, hardened her. The world, it could be argued, has rendered Katniss as “joyless” as Junior and …show more content…
It is important to note that this in turn likens Katniss and Rue to the marginalized Indian population, as well as real-world marginalized minority groups. It, the metaphor, then reiterates the idea that unconscious inclinations towards rebellion – and thus “violence” - are inevitably born as a result of suffering decades of unwarranted subjugation. Katniss, interestingly enough, actually corrects Rue; she explains that they are “strong, too,” “Just in a different way.” She reminds Rue that she can “feed” herself; that even this minor act of dissention can be, and sometimes has to be, enough.
In conclusion: both Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games are interspersed with myriad exhibitions of violence. This violence serves multiple purposes: it emphasizes the scope of the misfortunes weathered by the novels’ protagonists; it causes the readers to think about the ways in which human beings protect themselves from and react to injustice, and it causes the readers to recognize and ruminate over the real-world