Julie Huhn
Professor Harrison
English 115
1 December 2011
The Diary of Katniss Everdeen
Government corruption is a theme that is extremely evident throughout both Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and the movie The Diary of Anne Frank. In The Hunger Games, the Capitol has retaliated against the people of the districts for their revolt against them by making the economic difference between the Capitol and the districts even greater and by implementing the annual Hunger Games to remind the districts of their wrongdoing. The Diary of Anne Frank is based on the true account of a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who wrote down her experiences while living for two years in hiding in Holland during World War II, when Jews were literally being carted off by the truckloads to concentration camps where they would either be killed on the spot or worked to death. In the stories of both Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Anne Frank as recorded in her diary and portrayed in the movie, the corruption of the two governments is accentuated by the characters’ first-person points of view and their unique personal situations, as well as it is contrasted with the normalcy of life which is shown in their interpersonal relationships.
One of the most powerful devices used to highlight the governmental corruption in these two stories is the first-person voices of Katniss and Anne. Because of this device, audiences see the corruption of the world around them through the character’s eyes and understanding. Katniss’s view of Panem’s government in the Capitol is obvious from the very beginning. As she is from the poorest of the twelve districts, Katniss experiences the worst Panem has to offer. While many people in her district starve to death or die of illnesses, the people of the Capitol live plush, luxurious lives filled with rich, plentiful food and every high-tech, futuristic gadget thinkable. This enrages Katniss to no end, and many times she and her friend Gale illegally run outside of District 12’s fences into the forest to illegally hunt and illegally talk badly about the Capitol. Through these conversations, audiences are let in on many of her specific grievances against the Capitol. Katniss’s opinionated attitude is a hard contrast to that of the extremely sheltered Anne Frank. Anne begins her story as an innocent thirteen-year-old girl, who is sheltered from the details of the war that has been raging around her. As her story progresses, it is clear the Anne becomes more and more aware of the world around her and becomes more and more mature and independent as times goes on. She begins to realize that her friends and their families are being rounded up and taken to concentration camps, and that no one is truly safe. However, she never really seems to form an opinion of her government; instead, she just seconds her father’s opinions about the goings-on. Even so, she does form her own opinions; they are just about her family and her personal life instead of the outside world. The way these characters see their individual situations within their overarching circumstances helps audiences to more fully understand the specifics of the corruption that the girls face in their daily lives.
Katniss volunteered to place herself in this most terrifying and life-threatening situation of the Hunger Games. The whole point of the Hunger Games is for each of the districts to watch two of their children, who have been chosen at random, die violent deaths, and the last child alive wins extra food rations for his or her district for the next full year. Once she is in the Hunger Games, Katniss is able to experience firsthand what it is like to live in the richness of the Capitol. She is dressed in the finest clothes, fed the richest food, and is housed in the most extravagant lodging the Capitol has to offer. After seeing for herself the constant extravagance of the Capitol in contrast to her poorest-of-poor district, Katniss despises the Capitol even more. Because the Games are required viewing for every citizen of the country of Panem, Katniss has seen the Games play out every year for as long as she can remember. This in combination with her hunting skills gives her a survival-instinct advantage over the other competitors. In the Games, she must work, scavenge, or kill for everything she needs to survive; she is given only what she needs the most for free, and that relies on the discernment of her district mentor, Haymitch, whom Katniss has a hard time trusting. She must rely on Haymitch for her survival at many times, especially when the gamemakers from the Capitol intervene in the Games to make them more interesting for the rest of the Capitol to watch. The Capitol only cares about the Capitol’s interests; the rest of the country—all twelve districts—are required to watch their children fight to the death anyway, so it does not matter to the Capitol whether they are interested or not. In the end, rules are changed because of Katniss’s cleverness, and instead of just one victor, there are two—Katniss and the other competitor from District 12, Peeta. Katniss’s story may be very violent and horrific, but at least it has a happy ending for her.
Anne Frank, on the other hand, was forced into her situation—after receiving news that her older sister is to be sent to a Nazi work camp, the Frank family is faced with a devastating decision: they must either cooperate with the Nazi regime and face certain death, or they must go into hiding, which is their last hope of staying alive and together as a family. They pack as little as they can, dressing in multiple layers of clothing, as not to look suspicious. Because of their limited packing, they must rely on a woman named Miep Gies—who had worked as a secretary for Anne’s father, Otto—to supply them with the things that they need to survive, just as Katniss must rely on Haymitch during the Hunger Games. Like Katniss, Anne came from a poor background, though she did not really realize this. The Jewish population in Europe—or more specifically to the Frank family, in Holland—was treated as inferior to those who were not Jewish. This could parallel to Katniss’s being from District 12, which is the lowest district in Panem. While Katniss wass able to briefly taste the richness of the Capitol before she was sent into the Games, Anne is never given such an opportunity. Instead, Anne sinks from poor to poorer as her family of four, along with four other Jewish people, pile into a secret annex above her father’s warehouse, where they lived in hiding for over two years. Anne’s story does not have a happy ending, either—she and all of the people in hiding with her are discovered and sent off to various concentration camps, where most of them die, including Anne.
Though their situations are a direct consequence of the political corruption of the time, Katniss and Anne both experience relationships that bring a sort of normalcy into their lives to contrast the abnormality of their circumstances, one of which is their relationships with their mothers. They both have normal teenagers’ attitudes toward their mothers, although Katniss’s is more deeply rooted. Katniss loves her mother—this is shown when they must say their goodbyes after the Reaping—but she outwardly hates her for going into a sort of emotional coma when her husband died, leaving Katniss and her sister to fend for themselves. This forces Katniss to grow up much before her time, causing her to resent and distrust her mother. Although her mother is back to providing money for them, Katniss still must hunt and sell her kills on the black market to supplement her mother’s scanty income; this leads Katniss to believe that her mother, although doing her best, cannot adequately care for Katniss’s younger sister Prim on her own. Anne, however, is simply a daddy’s girl and feels that her mother is never on her side in arguments. Anne is naïve and has lofty dreams of marriage and fairy-tale love even in the midst of the war that is raging, and her mother does not approve because the war has destroyed her own joy and crushed her dreams. Her mother may have Anne’s best interest in mind and just does not want her to be hurt or disappointed when her dreams do not come to fruition, but Anne sees it as a personal attack on her character and her happiness. Anne’s father sides with her for the most part and does all he can to make his daughter feel loved, but he eventually lets her know that her mother does love her, which she of course does not believe, and Anne becomes angry with her father for not siding with her on the issue of her mother, as well.
In even more contrast to the political corruption surrounding these girls, they both found love in the midst of their circumstances. Katniss and Peeta have a sort of one-time-event history even before the games, in which Katniss and her family were starving, and Peeta burned some bloaves of bread in his parents’ bakery so that he would have to toss them out—to Katniss. They are chosen for the Games, and expecting to be adversaries, Katniss is annoyed by the very thought of Peeta. Even as the two of them are acting as a couple for the Games, Katniss still does not care for Peeta, but this annoyance soon turns into denial, as she begins to really have feelings for him as the Games progress. They fall deeply in love—for the viewers and gamemakers, of course—during the games, and their love is what keeps both of them alive in the end. Similarly, Anne is very much annoyed with Peter when he first moves into the annex. He is very quiet and shy, whereas she is very opinionated and curious. Slowly, they learn to understand each other and grow closer until they realize that they are in love. They try to hide it from their parents, but big secrets are hard to keep in such a small place. Their love gives them a distraction and a sense of hope and joy that carries them through their otherwise hopeless and dark situation.
The first-person points of view and personal stories of both Katniss and Anne help to show just how corrupt their governments are, but normalcy is brought to them within their relationships. Through each girl’s eyes, the audience can easily see her circumstances and understand their impact from the point of view of someone directly involved, which makes the story come alive and become memorable, as well as emphasizing the enormity of the corruption in the governments of each girl. Both Katniss and Anne are victims of their corrupt governments, and their stories of being pawns in the games of their governments each display that vividly. The only normalcy to be found in their lives is in their interpersonal relationships; their relationships with their mothers show us that they are really just normal teenaged girls, while their newfound romances give them each a glimmer of hope in their seemingly hopeless lives. Fortunately for Katniss, the odds were indeed in her favor—she and her romance lived to see another day; as for Anne, her story ends much more depressingly—it ends with the untimely end of her life.
Word count: 1911
Works Cited
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print.
The Diary of Anne Frank. Dir. George Stevens. Perf. Millie Perkins, Shelley Winters, and Joseph Schildkraut. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 1959. DVD.
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