Religious Spirit In The Hunger Games

This “spiritual food” that functions as a nourishment of the spirit is also clear in Katniss experience inside the arena, but also outside when she was a child and suffered tough moments when her father died and she was only 11. “Food serves as a very important sign” (Peksoy, 80), demonstrated since the moment in which Peeta Mellark, the boy with the bread, saved her and gave her hope to survive in one of the first challenging moments of her life. Whereas Mary’s text is full of her religious spirit, The Hunger Games is empty of any religion and there is no reference to this idea in the whole trilogy. It seems that for the futuristic country of Panem, religion is not important, but, anyway, people need to believe in something in order to survive

In that point, the connection between physical food and “spiritual food” arises again because Peeta emerged as the “savior God”, the benevolent one. He is kind, he loves her and he take care of her since they were children, feeding and nourishing her and, at the same time, cheering her up from the moment in which the Gamemakers inform that both can back home if they survive the rest of the tributes – and just after Rue’s death. In the words of (Peksoy, 82), “the boy with the bread symbolically acts as the source of nourishment and hope when all hope is gone” because he lighted up once the spark of hope and he does again, being the pillar in which Katniss knows that she could rest to take action. The image of Peeta as the savior is also reinforced by the idea that without that burned loaf of bread when they were 11, she could not be there, trying to challenge the Hunger Games and remaining herself as a woman with principles and a strong sense of justice. She became a heroine for Peeta, for her family, for her district and for the whole country, but as we said above with Mary Rowlandson, every heroine needs the other to take her stronger principles and beliefs from the inside and use them to survive over the