“Big Brother is Watching You”: The Hunger Games Trilogy as a Post- Apocalyptic Tale on the Destructiveness of All Forms of Totalitarianism

Abstract

This chapter investigates some similarities between Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it argues that the trilogy is a futuristic dystopia of naked punishment masquerading as live entertainment compatible with Orwell’s treatment of totalitarianism and the trope of Big Brother. The chapter also explores the first-person narrative voice used in the trilogy as a self-directed rhetoric of emotional detachment which is compatible with the female narrator’s traumatic story and her life in a totalitarian regime. Finally, the chapter analyses the protagonist’s inner voice in the context of trauma theory.