Capital Punishment In The Hunger Games By Suzanne Collins

“...he coughs, splattering my face with blood. I stagger back, repulsed by the warm, sticky spray. Then the boy slips to the ground. That’s when I see the knife in his back….the girl from District 2, ten yards away, running toward me, one hand clutching a half-dozen knives. I’ve seen her in training. She never misses. And I’m her next target.” (p. 150). The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins follows 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a girl who grew up in the poorest district in the country of Panem. When her younger sister gets chosen to become a tribute in the ruthless Hunger Games, the districts’ annual punishment for rebelling against the Capitol, Katniss volunteers to take her place and gets thrown into an arena with 23 other tributes who have

The Capitol is in control of Panem and forces the districts’ children to fight to the death as punishment for rebelling in the past. Every year, everyone from the district must gather for the reaping, which decides who will participate in the games. “The rules for the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.” (p. 18). Instead of punishing the districts financially or something along those lines, the Capitol directly targets their children and forces them to slaughter each other in an arena. Moreover, they see the children as nothing more than a way to hold power over the districts and prove a point, showing that they do not value the lives of people in the

Katniss and her friend from District 12, Gale, discuss what would happen if Katniss got reaped for the games. “‘There’s almost always some wood,’ Gale says. ‘Since that year half of them died of cold. Not much entertainment in that.’ It’s true. We spent one Hunger Games watching the players freeze to death at night. You could hardly see them because they were just huddled in balls and had no wood for fires or torches or anything. It was considered very anticlimactic in the Capitol, all those quiet, bloodless deaths” (p. 39). The people in the Capitol get bored because the death of the children isn’t exciting or gruesome enough. The society is so broken that all they want is a good show, completely disregarding the lives of others. Furthermore, the families and friends of the tributes are forced to watch the children die in the games and eventually they need to become numb to it in order to keep their sanity. The Capitol doesn’t care about the lives of the people in the districts, only