Comparing The Hunger Games And The Lottery

1231 Words5 Pages
Literature sometimes mirrors society. Authors express their opinion on political issues through their writing. They write stories that are a reflection of what’s happing in society at the time. They do it to put a lens on the issue. There are a few lenses through which political reading can be read. There is race, gender, class, and postcolonial theories. Each of these theories are political issues that our society has faced. This paper will focus on the postcolonial theory. Through a postcolonial analysis of The Hunger Games and "The Lottery," Collins and Jackson both reveal the importance of the dominance or rule from the past. First and foremost postcolonial theory consist of the colonizer and colonized. The colonizer is the one who settled…show more content…
The setting of the book is far into the future after the United States has been completely destroyed and place was formed named Panem. After the war a group of people took over and they became the government. They completely changed things around. They established what the book is mainly about the hunger games. This new place is divided into twelve districts. Every year they select a girl and a boy under the age of 18 as tributes from each of the twelve districts. The 24 tributes have to fight to the death with each other in an arena being watched by everyone. The government does this to remind them who is in control. People make an event out of this, kind of like the super bowl for…show more content…
The colonizer is a little harder to identify but it’s the tradition of the lottery. It could also be the people for holding on to the old ways. The people of this small town can’t seem to be able to move forward from this absurd tradition. From the conversation between the two men about getting rid of the lottery we can assume that the lottery was a way to maybe put order in the past. Again this tory is a great example of how the dominance and the rule from the past are so important and hard to move past. The authors both portray a cruel society. The Hunger Games show what people are capable of doing and “The Lottery” shows what people have been capable to do. The authors political agenda is clear it doesn’t matter how cruel or unjust something is if those are the rules then it must be right. They want to show how society works sometimes. They also wanted to show how hard it is to break those chains between the colonizer and the colonized. The two stories are different in setting and in plot but they both have the same exact message and both support postcolonial
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    Jackson’s short story ”The Lottery” and Suzanne Collins’s 374 page novel ”The Hunger Games,” citizens participate in traditions involving the sacrifice of innocent human life with silence as a common acknowledgment. However, characterization and gesture in the texts portray the difference between the stories with similar themes; The citizens in ”The Lottery” blindly accept the old tradition using their silence as a mark of approval, while citizens in ”The Hunger Games” view their tradition as a punishment

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