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  • Writer's pictureBeccah

The Boy with the Bread: Why You Should Reread the Hunger Games in 2021



I can’t recall what exactly it was that inspired me to pick up The Hunger Games this summer. I read them when I was twenty-one, and I watched the first two movies sometime around then, but I never watched the last two. I remember thinking all of it was okay but more of a one time read rather than a read again and again type of book. But for some reason, I wanted to read them again, and I picked them up for a reread, ten years after my initial reading, and was absolutely hooked. I just could not get enough of them. I read them and listened to the audiobook obsessively, oscillating between wanting to consume the whole story at once and forcing myself to stop and savor. I bought the movies and watched them and reread parts of the books I found fascinating or felt like I didn’t quite understand. As I planned out my syllabus for the fall semester, I decided to book end the curriculum with dystopia, starting with Fahrenheit 451 and ending with The Hunger Games.


I kept thinking about the characters and plot, but I also kept wondering, why do I like these books so much? Why are the hitting so differently at thirty-one than they did at twenty-one? I’m a Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and War & Peace person. What has changed in ten years that I’m locking in to these books? After much self-reflection, I think I have the answer.


One reason was that I actually took my time reading them. In my rereading I didn’t have (as much of) the arrogance of being an elite literature student, thinking that a careful reading of young adult book was unnecessary, and I think I missed a lot the first time. But arrogance aside, there’s a much more prominent reason: the boy with the bread.


Before, I didn’t really appreciate the peculiarity of Peeta, and his unusualness didn’t matter as much to me then as now. In the story Katniss is torn between two interest: Gale and Peeta. Katniss is, quite infamously, the girl on fire. She is hard and bitter over her father’s death and mother’s surrender into grieving—leaving her two daughters to suffer and starve. Katniss’s drive to protect her sister and anger towards the government embitter and emblazon her.


And, she’s torn between two relationships: Gale and Peeta. Gale is an echo of Katniss in many ways: same background of grief, same hardness of survival, and same fire against injustice, but ever so slightly pushing into cruelty.


Which, makes Peeta so odd a contrast to Katniss. He is not an anti-hero, swallowed by the passivity of anti-heroism like that of Slaughterhouse Five. He is defined again and again as strong, but not with a brooding byronic strength, but instead with love. He is almost entirely defined by his love for Katniss, his empathy for others, his creativity, and his ability with words to connect and move people.


Katniss’s initial desire is just to survive the Hunger Games. It is Peeta, on the rooftops before the games, who states that he wants to show the capital that they don’t own him. The defiance of the berries came from him, but without Katniss he wouldn’t have accomplished it.


The duality of natures in Katniss and Peeta reminds me of Montag and Faber in Fahrenheit 451. Montag is the fire of courage and Faber is the water of wisdom, and their minds work together to make wine. One needs the other to survive and really live. But Katniss and Peeta are not fire and water. Clearly Katniss is fire, but Peeta doesn’t bring water. He brings bread, broken. Though scorched by the fire, in the end it brings the community Katniss sings for in her song about the meadow, and that Wendell Berry articulates. Berry writes that “a community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

Which, makes it so interesting when Peeta’s love for Katniss is highjacked with fear and hatred. Peeta’s unraveling seems mostly like a moment of self-discovery for Katniss, but it also is for us. Who is Peeta without love?

He’s lost and broken, but ultimately he’s still self-sacrificing for the good of others. In Katniss’s bitter grief over the loss of Prim and a country torn by two evil sides, his selflessness, gentleness, and artistry is what she, and we, need to survive.

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