What Are The Similarities Between Sythe And The Hunger Games

Literary Essay

Rough Draft

The theme of both Scythe by Neal Shusterman and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is that people become less human when they lose respect for the dead.

Firstly, the theme in Scythe is that people become inhuman when they lose empathy for the dead. This is shown by the actions of Scythe Goddard, a scythe who joyfully kills people participates in mass gleanings, and is extremely cruel to the people he kills. During one of his mass gleanings on a plane, he looks to a man who tried to escape. The man comes back to the scythe to keep his family safe from the scythe’s gleanings since if he escapes, his family will be (brutally) murdered. Scythe Goddard forces him to choose the order in which the people on the other

He thinks to himself, “Clearly the scythe was enjoying this. He shouldn’t enjoy it that’s one of the basic precepts of Scythedom.”(Shusterman 74). It’s clear that in the example Scythe Goddard is a truly awful man. Not only is he a killer, but he also goes against the laws of Scythedom, put in place specifically to stop mass murderers. Scythes don’t do mass gleaning, the normal way to glean is just 1 person at a time. But Scythe Goddard goes out of his way to kill as many people as possible and makes their deaths even more painful by asking them to do things like selecting who all gets gleaned. Scythe Goddard doesn’t recognize that he is a human, just like him, who sacrificed himself to save his family, who is made of their own flesh that Goddard has. Goddard sees himself as an “angel of death”, a god, a deity of demise that is above everyone else. The

Scythe has a more direct approach, showing the mass gleanings of Scythe Goddard and his sociopathic tendencies. Goddard over all is an inhuman monster that does not have a lick of empathy, not for the living and certainly not for the dead. Goddard sees people as targets, a bloody goal he needs to crush, and sees himself as a god on Earth. “Make no mistake-we scythes are above the law because we deserve to be. I see a day when new scythes will be chosen not because of some esoteric moral high ground, but because they enjoy the taking of life.” (Shusterman 162). This journal entry by Scythe Goddard perfectly summarizes all points of believing that he himself believes he is better than everyone else, he doesn’t care for empathy or morals, and is a stone-cold killer. Hunger Games takes a different approach. Instead of displaying the theme by showing a character kills because he craves bloodshed, it shows characters who don’t value life and see death as entertainment through the Gamemakers and Capitol. After the games, after 22 kids died brutally, the capitol prep team has nothing to say, no consoling words to Katniss after weeks of torture, besides that they “Just had my eyebrows dyed!” or “Was still in bed!” when someone was murdered. As Katniss remarks, “Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.” (Collins 354). This displays the theme by showing how the