Death in Hansel and Gretel and the Hunger Games - Essay Example

14 December Death in Hansel and Gretel and The Hunger Games People would rather talk about the weather than death. It is easy to understand why people do not like talking about death. Death reminds people of their mortality. It means that they can die anytime, anywhere, whether they are rich or poor, famous or unknown. No one escapes the inetability of death. Two tales, however, directly narrate and question one of society's taboos: Death. This paper examines what death means for two famous works, Brother Grimms' Hansel and Gretel and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. These stories describe that the worst death is the death of humanity inside humanity, because then, people turn into beasts. Death means death of “death of death” as taboo, as well as death of humanity through the loss of morality rationality, and civil liberties,. For poor people, death is not a taboo, because it is part of their reality. Collins' Hunger Games is set in dystopia, where the Capitol controls twelve (12) districts by siphoning their resources and keeping them poor and hungry. The people, as a result, are too hungry to revolt against the system, particularly after the first revolution led to the creation of the Hunger Games. Collins shows that death is something real and evident in the Seam. Katniss thinks: “Gale and I agree that if we have to choose between dying of hunger and a bullet in the head, the bullet would be much quicker”(Collins 18). She thinks about this, because she knows how hard it is to survive in Panem, when the Capitol controls and owns all resources and food. She knows how hard it is to die slowly from hunger, and it is harder to watch one's family die slowly from the fangs of hunger too. What is taboo in Panem is listing starvation as the cause of death: “Starvation is never the cause of death officially. It’s always the flu, or exposure, or pneumonia. But that fools no one” (Collins 29). Listing this can be taken as a sign of rebellion and no one can try that again after the botched rebellion a long time ago. The couple in Hansel and Gretel do not fear death as a topic too. The poor woodcutter and his wife witness their food depleting fast and the wife recommends that they let their children die in the woods: “They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them” (Grimm). This thinking reflects the importance of self-survival over parental instincts and humanity. Hansel and Gretel's mother would have her children dead than find herself dying from hunger too. They talk about death as if it is the weather, unimportant and something that is paradoxically part of their existence. These stories argue that death is not limited to its physical dimension, because humanity can also die within people, when their sense of morality is gone. The Hunger Games kills humanity's morality. Part of it is knowing that life is a jungle and every one is game, especially in the Hunger Games. Katniss thinks that it will not be right to be affected too much by Peeta's kindness: “So I decide, from this moment on, to have as little as possible to do with the baker’s son” (Collins 49). To feel kindness and indebtedness will make her vulnerable and vulnerability is the first step toward death. The Hunger Games turns death into an option that can be erased, if one gives up one's morality. Morality also dies when people choose to be beasts. When Gale visits Katniss, he tells her that hunting in the forest is the same as hunting for people. Katniss does not believe in this: “The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all” (Collins 41). One of the power implications of this statement is that an authoritarian society ensures that people's morality are gone, so that they can be ruled easier. At the individual level, Katniss is saying that if she can kill people so easily, then she is not a human being anymore, just another beast among wild animals. Another way that morality is killed is through trauma. When Katniss' father dies, her mother dies too from this traumatic experience. She yields to depression and almost eats nothing, if not forced to. She must have wanted to die also and be with her husband. Katniss says: “Prim forgave her, but I had taken a step back from my mother, put up a wall to protect myself from needing her, and nothing was ever the same between us again” (Collins 54). Katniss cannot forgive her mother, because she deserted them by mentally blocking them out. For Katniss, it is her mother's responsibility to take care of them, but she transferred that burden to her, while she was too young to handle it. Because of this, Katniss' respect for her mother dies too. She recognizes this when she leaves them. She remembers that she has not told her mother she loves ever since the latter “goes down under.” The Hunger Games shows that when children cannot respect their parents anymore, then a part of their humanity dies too. Collins also uses coal as a symbol for human darkness, the darkness of immorality. Coal is dark and used to produce power. The state gets almost all the coal from District 12. Coal stands for their authoritarian power that they use to oppress people. Coal can also be seen as the darkness in people's lives. Coal has enveloped them enough to not even hope for hope. They know that the State is powerful enough to crush budding insurgencies. Though they know that the State is tyrannical, and therefore immoral and irrational, they cannot do anything about it. They only have coal to show for the darkness and futility of rebellion. The Hunger Games already exist. Something worse can happen if they rebel too. Candy colors and cosmetic surgery are also symbols of immorality, because they stand for superficial sweetness and looks, respectively. When Katniss arrives at the Capitol, she can see the colors of the people. Their skins and attire, as well as their buildings are bright with colors. They are like a sea of candy. But candy has sweetness that is artificial. The same can be said with the Capitol. Its beauty is contrived, not real. The meaning of these candy colors is that the Capitol wants to look like a place of beauty, but it is only a place of human darkness. Its colors cannot hide the darkness of the rulers' hearts. The Capitol is also concerned of their physical looks, so they are crazy about cosmetic surgery: “They do surgery in the Capitol, to make people appear younger and thinner” (Collins 124). This is a situational irony, because people give more credence to their outside looks than their inside humanity. They cannot forget to look young, but they can forget to criticize and to oppose the immorality of the Hunger Games. Morality also vanishes in Hansel and Gretel. It is not right to let one's children die in the woods, but Hansel and Gretel's mother is willing to do it to save herself from hunger. She calls her husband a “fool” for not considering this suggestion at first and she says: “Then we must all four die of hunger, thou mayest as well plane the planks for our coffins” (Grimm). She emphasizes that her husband has to choose between two options: they will all die, or the children will die and they will leave. The problem with the last option is its immorality. It is wrong to kill innocent people and yet this woman is willing to kill her own children, though in an indiscreet manner, because they will the children in the forest to die either from hunger or from beasts. Then again, the real beast is the mother. She should be the protector of her children, but she becomes their nemesis instead. The witch in this story is also immoral, because she uses her house of treats to lure children and then she eats them: “When a child fell into her power, she killed it, cooked and ate it, and that was a feast day with her” (Grimm). The witch kills unknowing victims, and children at that. Another way of killing one's morality is through erasing trust between human beings, because without trust, it will be easier to kill and use each other. Katniss does not know what to think of Peeta. On the one hand, he could be genuinely in love with her. On the other hand, he could be using a love-interest-angle as his primary strategy. Katniss thinks: “A warning bell goes off in my head. Don’t be so stupid...He is luring you in to make you easy prey. The more likable he is, the more deadly he is” (Collins 72). In addition, Katniss also uses Peeta to her own advantage. She knows the possibility that she is being used, so she uses Peeta too and kisses him on cue. She also holds his hand and engages him in sweet conversations in public. These actions demonstrate that people use each other as means to their ends and this is not moral according to Kant. Kant believes that an action is moral if people treat others as ends and not as their means to their ends. Morality also disappears when indifference exists enough to lead to other people's harms. Katniss could have helped someone survive the Capitol's pursuit in the forest. Because of her hesitation, that woman whom the state is hunting is an Avox now, a slave with her tongue cut, which is a punishment from the State. Katniss connects her indifference to this Avox with the people watching the Hunger Games: “That I’m ashamed I never tried to help her in the woods. That I let the Capitol kill the boy and mutilate her without lifting a finger. Just like I was watching the Games” (Collins 85). Humans care for each other; they protect one another and that is the moral thing to do. In Hunger Games, that sense of human connection and protection is deleted through the systematic psychological conditioning of the state. The state has conditioned to people to watch and to enjoy the Hunger Games, as if it is not an immoral event. The Hunger Games has been turned into the norm, even a more, which makes it even more immoral. People then just stand by and look as their children are used by the state to enforce subjugation. Indifference at this level is equal to doing something bad, since both result to negative repercussions. The loss of inhumanity is also attributed to rationality's death in Hansel and Gretel and The Hunger Games. Hunger kills rationality. There is no dignity in finding food in the garbage but at one point in her life, Katniss searches these garbage cans so that she and her family can survive. Unfortunately, these bins are empty: “I lifted the lid to the baker’s trash bin and found it spotlessly, heartlessly bare” (Collins 30). The bareness of this trash can represents the bareness of their souls. Hunger may only be a physiological event, but it has spiritual repercussions. Many people will find it hard to have faith and hope, when they are dying from hunger, together with their families. There is also nothing rational with the Hunger Games, but Capitol people advertise it, as if it represents a happy turning point in human history. Katniss and Gale joke about the Hunger Games, because Effie Trinket keeps on saying: “And may the odds...be ever in your favor!” (Collins 8-9). The irony with this statement is that the odds is not about a simple game only, but a game about human lives. The Capitol uses an irrational means to maintain subservience among its people through the Hunger Games. The essence of the Hunger Games is also clear. It aims to quell the rational will of the people to rebel against an unjust state: Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.” (Collins 19). The Hunger Games is an irrational attempt to control rational desires for freedom and other civil liberties. Hansel and Gretel's mother also thinks irrationally, when she does not consider other options to survive. She is inhuman enough to even consider sacrificing her children for own gain. Irrationality can lead to people's demise. These stories also express the absence of civil liberties that undermine humanity. In The Hunger Games, the people are not free to express their opinion against their government. Katniss remembers: “When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt out about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far-off city called the Capitol” (Collins 7). She wants to express her opposition of the government's tyranny, but she realizes that this will also bring trouble to her family. As a result, she chooses to stay quite and keep to herself, in order to avoid endangering herself and her family too. Justice does not exist, when freedom is not a given. Collins uses two contrasting images to show the injustice of the Capitol: Everything would be perfect if this really was a holiday, if all the day off meant was roaming the mountains with Gale, hunting for tonight’s supper. But instead we have to be standing in the square at two o’clock waiting for the names to be called out. (Collins 10). Hunger Games is also about control and obedience. Katniss notes that while other families enjoy their weeks during the Hunger Games, those whose children will be part of the Games will physically and emotionally suffer: “But at least two families will pull their shutters, lock their doors, and try to figure out how they will survive the painful weeks to come” (Collins 11). Hansel and Gretel also lose their ability to choose if they want to live or not. Their mother chooses for them: that they should die than live. When imprisoned by the witch, Hansel and Gretel also experience what it means to be physically unfree. At least in the woods, they can roam around as free people. In the witch's house, their freedom to move is dead. Also in The Hunger Games, Collins uses symbols to express authoritarian power structures that curtail civil liberties. The mines symbolize control over the people, where the government suffocates people's civil liberties. Inside the mine, the effect of being buried underneath the existing power structure becomes palpable. Light and hope cannot be perceived and only darkness and oppression heavily dawn on people. The mines are like the tunnels and produce that oppressive effect on Katniss: “The tunnel goes on and on...I hate being encased in stone this way. It reminds me of the mines and my father, trapped, unable to reach sunlight, buried forever in the darkness” (Collins 59). Truly under an authoritarian government, people feel trapped and buried, because they feel dead without their civil liberties. Waxing is also a process that disempowers people. The process includes stripping people of their civil liberties. Katniss cannot say no to the waxing of her body. She has lost her freedom to choose, her autonomy: “My legs, arms, torso, underarms, and parts of my eyebrows have been stripped of the Muff...” (Collins 62). She feels vulnerable: “I don’t like it. My skin feels sore and tingling and intensely vulnerable” (Collins 61-62). People also feel vulnerable when stripped of their civil liberties. They have no freedom of speech and organization, and almost all facets of their lives are controlled by the government. For the authoritarian wax strips them of all form of freedoms and when that occurs, they are also stripped of their humanity. The elevator further symbolizes what it means to have power, which the people loose under a tyrannical state. Katniss enjoys the elevator ride at the Capitol. The elevator represents power, because people can go up and down with ease and comfort: “The walls of this elevator are made of crystal so that you can watch the people on the ground floor shrink to ants as you shoot up into the air. It’s exhilarating...” (Collins 73). She enjoys not just the experience of luxury, but the sense of freedom and empowerment. But all those are quelled in her world. Panem does not promote social and political mobility or empowerment. The State reserves power to itself and so it is the only institution that can push the buttons of society's elevators. This essay shows the varied faces of death. Death comes in many packages: “death of death” as taboo, as well as death of civil liberties, morality, and rationality. Hansel and Gretel and The Hunger Games tackle the topic of death, so that they can emphasize what life means. To live is not merely to exist. To really live, people must have basic liberties and feel no fear for death. To live means knowing that anything can happen, because people are free to make choices that can make their lives happy and meaningful. Finally, to live is to be human and to have the freedom to fight for that humanity. Works Cited Brothers Grimm. Hansel and Gretel. Web. 14 Dec. 2011. . Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print. Read More