The Hunger for Capitalism The first book of the trilogy, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins introduces the oppressive reign of the Capitol in the futuristic United States. At the same time, the book demonstrates how the repressive violence of the State leads to serious psychological effects of the main characters. In order to determine this, I conduct a Marxist literary analysis of the Hunger Games, by focusing on representations of capitalism and commodities, and further, how the ideologies of the Capitol repressed the unconsciousness of Katniss in a way, that she accepts a capitalist dictatorship in Panem as a natural state. Usually, scholars interpret the Hunger Games as the novel critiquing capitalism. However, by using the sequence of …show more content…
Perhaps the most important reason why Freud’s Psychoanalysis could be really useful in analyzing repressed consciousness is that it suggests an explanation as to how capitalistic dictatorship has such a huge impact on the working class consciousness in the Hunger Games. Freud’s concept of the unconscious as the realm of repression defines the effect of the capitalist ideology on the personality of Katniss and other workers of the Capitol. Moreover, it is possible to trace the mechanisms of how this unconscious has been formed - inside the family through the experiences that begin from the childhood of each …show more content…
She remembers, that when she was eleven, Peeta saved her life by giving out burned bread to her. And even 5 years later Katniss fails to understand an unfair treatment of her class. “Why would he have done it? He didn’t even know me. Still, just throwing me the bread was an enormous kindness that would have surely resulted in a beating if discovered. I couldn’t explain his actions” (Collins 32). Katniss denies the fact that the cause of that starvation is the Capitol’s structures. She prefers to forget the part of her life where she was forced for the starvation to death, rather than to acknowledge the fact that this is not “normal” and overcome