Social Stratification in The Hunger Games
Many people consider their daily lives to be “normal.” To someone with privilege, being picked up from school in a Lexus and going home to a 6,000 square foot house is typical. To someone less fortunate, this is outrageous when buses and apartments are the norm. The world is divided up into social classes, from rich to poor, and those found in between. In fact, many novels revolve around this. Suzanne Collins accurately depicts social stratification in her novel The Hunger Games.
Collins accurately portrays different social classes. Her examples of the different divisions of class and social stratification are present in societies all around the world. How such class divisions develop can …show more content…
His analysis is as follows: Property (wealth), power (influence), and prestige (status) divide people into social classes, where the people with the most of the three are on top, while the people with the least are on the bottom (“What Divides Us: Stratification”). Prestige in particular is important in the novel, because it is not reliant on social class.“Although property and power are objective, prestige is subjective, for it depends on other people’s perceptions and attitudes”(“What Divides Us: Stratification”). This is illustrated by the tributes from the districts. Before they are tributes, they are simply working class citizens, but as soon as they are selected, they turn into celebrities. “The people of the capitol are going nuts, showering us with flowers, shouting our names, our first names, which they have bothered to find on the program”(Collins 78). The prestige of the tributes is an issue raised throughout, as they change social rank. However, the social classes are still intact. By showing how the dominant class controls the lower class, and showing the “three P’s” in the novel, as stated by Weber (“What Divides Us: Stratification”), Collins correctly illustrates how societies maintain social
Many people consider their daily lives to be “normal.” To someone with privilege, being picked up from school in a Lexus and going home to a 6,000 square foot house is typical. To someone less fortunate, this is outrageous when buses and apartments are the norm. The world is divided up into social classes, from rich to poor, and those found in between. In fact, many novels revolve around this. Suzanne Collins accurately depicts social stratification in her novel The Hunger Games.
Collins accurately portrays different social classes. Her examples of the different divisions of class and social stratification are present in societies all around the world. How such class divisions develop can …show more content…
His analysis is as follows: Property (wealth), power (influence), and prestige (status) divide people into social classes, where the people with the most of the three are on top, while the people with the least are on the bottom (“What Divides Us: Stratification”). Prestige in particular is important in the novel, because it is not reliant on social class.“Although property and power are objective, prestige is subjective, for it depends on other people’s perceptions and attitudes”(“What Divides Us: Stratification”). This is illustrated by the tributes from the districts. Before they are tributes, they are simply working class citizens, but as soon as they are selected, they turn into celebrities. “The people of the capitol are going nuts, showering us with flowers, shouting our names, our first names, which they have bothered to find on the program”(Collins 78). The prestige of the tributes is an issue raised throughout, as they change social rank. However, the social classes are still intact. By showing how the dominant class controls the lower class, and showing the “three P’s” in the novel, as stated by Weber (“What Divides Us: Stratification”), Collins correctly illustrates how societies maintain social