Abstract
The imagery of bread in The Hunger Games provides an opportunity to read the novel within a Christian tradition alert to themes of suffering, sacrifice and solidarity. This article examines how the novel ‘re-enchants’ bread as both a site of ideological conflict and potential social healing, and draws out how this relates to the book’s place within consumer capitalism and young adult fiction. It also considers how a Christian interpretation might connect to current tensions around inclusion and identity.
Highlights
Suzanne Collin’s dystopian novel The Hunger Games contains an overt critique of certain aspects of modern economic and popular culture
My reading focuses on the imagery of bread in the novel, and the way Collins’ work seems to associate it with the hazardous moral and social universe her characters navigate
Citizens are granted “a meagre year’s supply of grain and oil for one person”, if they put an extra token with their name on it into the lottery which selects those who will fight to death in the arena. (Collins, 17)
Summary
Suzanne Collin’s dystopian novel The Hunger Games contains an overt critique of certain aspects of modern economic and popular culture. Reading the novel with the resources of the Christian tradition is not an attempt to explain away its meanings in terms of preexisting imagery which should control interpretation, nor to dissolve its specificity via abstract principles, but a way of paying even closer attention to the shape and implications of particular passages.
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