The Centralization Of Government In The Hunger Games By Suzanne Collins

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The inspiration for Suzanne Collin’s novel, The Hunger Games, came from channel surfing between reality shows where young kids were competing against each other to young kids fighting each other in a real war. The shows began to blur together in Collin’s mind and soon the story of Katniss began to develop (Interview). Katniss is a sixteen-year-old girl living in district 12, a coal-mining district, who winds up fighting in the Hunger Games after volunteering to take her twelve year old sister’s place. The novel takes place in a futuristic world after an apocalypse has flooded most of the landmass leaving behind a newly reshaped American continent now named Panem. Panem is structured into small districts and the central Capitol. The Capitol …show more content…
It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.”
We can see this completely in the financial structure of Panem and in the way the wealth is being distributed. District 12 mines the coal, the coal is sent to Panem, they are left with none of their finished product because the resource never belonged to them, I will further this argument later. This then creates a class divide between the workers and those from the Capitol. Katniss feels this class divide fully when she is hosted by the Capitol before the games. She imagines putting together a meal like the one see is eating back in her district and winds up realizing that, “days of hunting and gathering for this one meal and even then it would be a poor substitution for the Capitol version” (Collins, 65). The wealth of the nation is located in the hands of a few creating class divides and an obvious bourgeoisie

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