





































In an interview with Rick Margolis in 
2008, Suzanne Collins explains where 

she discovered her inspiration to write her 
best-selling trilogy, The Hunger Games:

One night, I was lying in bed, and I was 
channel surfing between reality TV pro-
grams and actual war coverage. On one 
channel, there’s a group of young people 
competing for I don’t even know; and on 
the next, there’s a group of young people 
fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, 
and the lines between these stories started 
to blur in a very unsettling way … there is 
so much programming, and I worry that 
we’re all getting a little desensitized to the 
images on our televisions. (Margolis)

The inherent problem that Collins saw on her television that night and the backbone of her trilogy 
is the blurring of reality with fiction, the seeing of something real (such as violence or war) and 
treating it as something fictitious or dramatized. Collins noticed this competition between actual 
and staged violence, and she used this concept to write a novel series centered on the dramatized 
and staged fighting of children in an arena. Not only does the violence that occurs in the arena 
include ties to ancient Roman gladiator fighting, but it is also reminiscent of modern-day reality 
television programs.

But, this focus on staged violence and the subsequent desensitization to that very same violence 
is not the only theme that appears in Collins’s trilogy. The fighting that appears in the arena of the 
Hunger Games is situated in the larger society of Panem, which is the country in which The Hunger 
Games trilogy takes place. It is in this society where the citizens of the twelve districts are enslaved 
by the Capitol and forced to produce the commodities that are used by the citizens of the Capitol 
as they live their opulent lifestyles. The citizens of the districts are controlled by the Capitol and 
their peacekeepers, who punish anyone who does not comply with the Capitol’s orders. Despite 

The Desensitization to Violence 
and the Perpetuation of Oppression 
and Slavery in Suzanne Collins’s The 
Hunger Games Trilogy

Bryce Longenberger, Ball State University

Key Words:
The Hunger Games, desensitization to violence, 
Roman gladiators, slavery and entertainment

Abstract:
This paper analyzes slavery in Suzanne Collins’s 
The Hunger Games trilogy by contextualizing 
her works within the history of Roman 
gladiator fighting and by examining the social 
structures of oppression within the society 
that Collins creates. The essay explores how 
the trilogy highlights the ways that people can 
perpetuate systems of slavery within a society 
when they become desensitized to violence 
and both benefit from and are entertained by 
the exploitation of others.  

75

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Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce critical edition to dlr@bsu.edu. 



the presence of brute force and violence, the actual structure of Panem’s society – such as the phys-
ical layout of the districts and the role of the reaping and the Hunger Games – is instrumental in 
enabling the enslavement of the district citizens to occur. In this way, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger 
Games trilogy performs two crucial functions in its discourse on slavery. First, the resemblance of 
Roman gladiator fighting inherent in the annual Hunger Games provides us with a warning about 
the dangers of becoming desensitized to violence. Second, the structure of Panem’s society, which 
I will analyze through the application of theories about slavery, provides us with a second warning 
about the effects that social structures can have on the existence and perpetuation of slavery. In the 
end, analyzing these two elements of Collins’s trilogy highlights important issues present in mod-
ern-day society and its treatment of slavery today.

Background and Definitions
Before I move on, I believe a brief reprise of the trilogy would aid in a clarification of my argu-

ment. The Hunger Games trilogy is set in a futuristic country called Panem that occupies part of 
North America. Seventy-four years before the start of the first book, there existed thirteen districts 
and a capitol that ruled over them. When the districts rebelled, the Capitol subdued twelve of the 
districts and destroyed the thirteenth. To punish the districts for their rebellion, the Capitol created 
an annual event called the Hunger Games. Every year, a male and a female child between the ages of 
twelve to eighteen are picked from each district and sent to the Capitol as tributes and retribution 
for the rebellion. Those children are then forced to fight to the death in an arena while the entire 
nation of Panem is forced to watch. Ever since the rebellion, the citizens of the districts are forced 
to work in their own districts for all of their lives, while the citizens of the Capitol live a luxurious 
lifestyle where they enjoy the fruits of the districts’ labor. The trilogy is then focused on a girl chosen 
from District 12, Katniss Everdeen, and her ensuing fight against the control of the Capitol.

In this paper I will be exploring how slavery is presented in the trilogy; therefore, I believe it is 
pertinent to provide a concrete but not exhaustive definition of slavery. Sociologist Orlando Patter-
son defines slavery in terms of power and domination: “Slavery is one of the most extreme forms 
of the relationship of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the 
master, and total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave” (1). In his analysis of modern-day 
slavery, Kevin Bales describes the system of slavery as “the state of control exercised over the slave 
based on violence or its threat, a lack of any payment beyond sustenance, and the theft of labor or 
other qualities of the slave for economic gain” (9). Both of these scholars consider slavery in a way 
that includes a display of complete control and domination of one person over another. This is the 
definition on which I will base my analysis.

Ancient Roman Gladiatorial Events and the Desensitization 
to Violence

The theme of desensitization to violence in The Hunger Games trilogy centers on the annual 
Hunger Games and the arena where the tributes are forced to fight one another. In order to fully 
understand this theme that Suzanne Collins presents, we must first examine the Hunger Games’ 
resemblance to gladiatorial events in Ancient Rome. By doing this, we can better understand how 
the desensitization to violence occurs.

The earliest recorded gladiatorial event held in ancient Rome occurred in 264 B.C. The early 
gladiator games were called a munus, or a “duty” or “gift,” which was done in honor of the dead. In 

76 Longenberger



her research on Roman gladiators, Alison Futrell tells us that the early munus was connected with 
the funerals of deceased and prominent members of Roman society (19). But, as Roger Dunkle 
explains in his book on gladiatorial spectacles, the games would eventually cease to be associated 
with funerals and would stand as a spectacle in and of themselves (7). Dunkle also points out 
that we currently hold an incorrect notion that gladiatorial events were an everyday occurrence 
in Roman society. He notes, “In the Republic and the imperial period, gladiator games were a 
relative rarity, even under emperors who were active givers of spectacles, and that rarity was an 
important factor in the popularity of the games” (72). It stands to reason that the “rarity” of the 
games built up more hype surrounding the games themselves, which made it more effective and 
popular among the people. We can see this fact present in The Hunger Games trilogy as well. The 
infrequency of the annual Hunger Games mimics the timing of the Roman gladiatorial games, 
and the popularity of the games among the citizens of the Capitol could also be attributed to the 
rarity of the games. 

The desensitization to violence originated in Ancient Rome because of the attitudes of the 
spectators towards the gladiators themselves. This will become apparent when we examine who the 
gladiators were. Among those fighting in the arena, there were typically two main types of people 
who became gladiators. The first were people who were forced to train and fight in the arena, usually 
as a form of punishment. These would consist of slaves, prisoners of war, and criminals convicted 
of capital crimes (Dunkle 30). An interesting fact is that there were also other criminals killed in 
the arena, but they were not gladiators. The criminals who fought in the arena as gladiators were 
called damnati ad ladum gladiatorium, but the other criminals were called noxii. Instead of fighting, 
the noxii were killed during the noonday festivities that split the morning and afternoon gladiatorial 
events. As Donald Kyle points out in his overview of gladiatorial events, the noxii were “men (and 
women) sentenced to execution, crucifixion, fire, or the beasts” (91). Punished for extreme criminal 
acts against the state, these criminals were deprived of the rights of Roman citizens and were thus 
given the worst forms of capital punishment. Unlike the gladiators who were given a chance to fight 
and survive, noxii had no chance of surviving the games. The two types of gladiators are also repre-
sented in The Hunger Games trilogy; interestingly enough, the tributes are actually a combination 
of the gladiators and noxii. They are allowed to fight in the game and thus have a chance of winning, 
and in that sense they are like gladiators. At the same time, twenty-three of the tributes are destined 
to die and, thus, have no chance of winning; in that sense, they are like the noxii. 

The other group of gladiators was formed from people who were not forced to fight; instead, 
they were volunteers. In his book on the invisible people of ancient Rome, Robert Knapp states 
that, upon signing up for gladiatorial training, the volunteer “swore he would give up his rights to 
protection under the law, promising to allow himself to ‘be burned, chained, beaten, or killed’ in 
his contracted position” (267). In essence, the volunteer lost all of his legal rights in exchange for 
a chance to fight for fame and fortune. Similarly, those who volunteer for the Hunger Games are 
also treated in this manner; upon volunteering, they too lose all rights and are forced to fight to the 
death, just like the tributes who are picked by the reaping.

All in all, even though there were both gladiators who were forced to fight and those who 
volunteered, all of the gladiators were usually viewed as criminals. According to Roger Dunkle, 
this meant that spectators inevitably came to one conclusion about gladiators: “The prevailing 
feeling among Romans was that gladiators, given their background of slavery, crime or opposition 
to the Roman state as enemy soldiers, deserved whatever fate they suffered” (18). This feeling was 
also leveled against the tributes: because the tributes are all from one of the twelve districts, and 

77 Longenberger



because the Hunger Games is a form of punishment and retribution for the rebellion, the Capitol 
believes all of the tributes, whether they were reaped or volunteered, deserve to die for the crimes 
their people committed in the past. 

This level of dislike and contempt for gladiators and tributes also leads to a feeling of apathy 
toward the wellbeing of the fighters, which can be seen in the lives of the gladiators after they leave 
the arena. Many gladiators seemed to have died in the arena; of those who did not, the remainder 
of their lives was short-lived and painful (overall gladiators did not normally live past the age of 
thirty). An excavation of sixty-seven skeletons of gladiators in Ephesus, Turkey, revealed that most 
of the skeletons had sustained physical deformities and traumas from fighting in the arena (Knapp 
277-278). Even if a gladiator survived the arena, the injuries he sustained from fighting ailed him 
for the rest of his short life. Not only did gladiators suffer from their fighting, but spectators also 
did not care what happened to the gladiators; spectators believed that gladiators deserved what 
they received from fighting, which made them apathetic toward the pain and suffering the glad-
iators endured. The Hunger Games also had similar impacts on the tributes. As Suzanne Collins 
points out in an interview she gave about the Catching Fire film in 2013, Katniss displays signs of 
post-traumatic stress disorder at the beginning of the second novel (Grossman). With the fact that 
Peeta is given an artificial leg after he left the Hunger Games in the first novel, even the victors do 
not escape the games unscathed. And, most importantly, after Katniss and Peeta win the Hunger 
Games, the citizens of the Capitol are much more interested in their love life than they are with 
their physical and emotional suffering.

This feeling of apathy toward other human beings is best appreciated when we understand that 
the gladiator games, and the annual Hunger Games as well, were about entertainment and “putting 
on a good show.” In this light, the gladiator’s life, and whether he lived or died, became irrelevant. 
If a gladiator found that he could no longer fight, he could ask the editor, or the person in charge of 
the games, for missio, which was basically an honorable discharge from battle. If the editor thought 
the gladiator had performed excellently, he would grant missio and allow both gladiators to leave 
the arena alive. If, however, the editor refused to give missio, then the defeated gladiator was instant-
ly killed by his opponent (Dunkle 140-141). In this manner, the gladiator’s life was still completely 
in the hands of the editor; he could be killed or his life could be spared, but both choices were out 
of his hands. Most importantly, the editor often based his decision on the attitude of the crowd or 
the Caesar; the editor’s ultimate goal was to ensure that a good performance and entertainment 
was provided. Katniss and Peeta find themselves in the very same situation at the end of the 74th 
Hunger Games. The Capitol has complete domination over their lives; even though the Capitol 
chooses to let both of them live, it is only because the Capitol must put on a good show, and having 
a Hunger Games with no survivors would not make that happen. In the end, the fact that the life 
of a tribute is dependent on providing entertainment, and simultaneously that the citizens of the 
Capitol are only interested in being entertained, is evidence of the apathy and desensitization 
toward the violence unfolding before them.

Ultimately, the research into gladiators in ancient Rome highlights the desensitization to vio-
lence held by the spectators of those violent spectacles. As we’ve seen, when applied to The Hunger 
Games trilogy, the context of gladiator history warns us about the dangers of being desensitized to 
violence. The citizens of the Capitol are consumed with the entertainment aspects of the annual 
Hunger Games. Unlike the people in the districts, who are forced to watch the Hunger Games, the 
citizens of the Capitol freely choose to indulge in the fighting and suffering in the Hunger Games. 
Katniss sums up this view of Capitol citizens perfectly: “What do they do all day, these people in 

78 Longenberger



the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to 
roll in and die for their entertainment” (Collins, The Hunger Games 65). The citizens of the Capitol 
are so accustomed to the death in the arena that they no longer care that children are dying. As if 
that wasn’t terrible enough, the Capitol citizens also seem to be extremely oblivious to the plight of 
all of the other citizens of the districts. According to Tom Henthorne, the attitudes of the members 
of the Capitol toward the other district citizens is much worse: “[the] citizens are so caught up in 
the artificial drama that plays out on television that they pay little attention to the fact that their 
‘president’ is, in fact, a dictator who attained power by murdering his rivals or that their affluence 
comes at the cost of great privation elsewhere” (105). The last part is extremely indicative of 
their knowledge of slavery: the citizens of the Capitol are so obsessed with the entertainment the 
Hunger Games provides that they are blissfully unaware that the citizens of the districts are being 
oppressed and enslaved. This type of ignorance is like a veil placed over the Capitol’s eyes so that 
they don’t realize the horrors of the existence of the districts.

The Societal Structure of The Hunger Games and the Perpetuation 
of Oppression and Violence

We have already seen how the annual Hunger Games, in its connection to Roman gladiatorial 
events, highlights the dangers of becoming desensitized and apathetic to the suffering of other 
human beings. In The Hunger Games trilogy, the social structure of Panem also warns us about the 
dangers that those very same societal structures can have in enabling slavery to occur. In The Hunger 
Games trilogy, this manifests itself in the physical layout of the districts, the reaping that chooses the 
children who will be the tributes, and the socioeconomic inequality among the district citizens.

 One of the structures of Panem’s society is the layout of the districts, which utilizes the ideology 
of space and place. In the introduction to their book Place of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Muse-
ums and Memorials, Greg Dickinson et. al. provide a definition for space and place. Even though 
their book focuses on the rhetoric within museums and memorials, their definition and distinction 
between space and place is, I believe, still relevant to my argument. They state, “Space and place 
[are used] … to emphasize a difference in how physical situatedness is experienced. In such usages, 
a place that is bordered, specific, and locatable by being named is seen as different from open, 
undifferentiated, undesignated space” (23). Place is seen, then, as that which has a definite shape 
and border, and space is everything that has a lack thereof. But, I believe we can take this definition 
even further. We, as humans, build houses, walls, and even national borders; we like to inhabit 
places because their definite shape provides us with a sense of safety and identity. Everything not 
enclosed in those defined spaces is foreign and, therefore, for the most part, undesirable.

 In The Hunger Games, the layout of Panem’s society constructs the twelve districts as places and 
the land outside those districts as merely empty space. The district citizens also seem to associate 
safety with their own districts. District 12, for example, is surrounded by “a high chain-link fence 
topped with barbed-wire loops. In theory, it’s supposed to be electrified twenty-four hours a day as 
a deterrent to the predators that live in the woods – packs of wild dogs, lone cougars, bears – that 
used to threaten our streets” (Collins, The Hunger Games 4). The fenced-off edges of the district, 
which also make the district a distinct and safe place, serve to protect the citizens of the district 
from the “evil” lurking in the space outside their districts. Furthermore, this distinction between 
space and place causes the district citizens to actually desire to take refuge in their own districts. 
Katniss notes that, “In the fall, a few brave souls sneak into the woods to harvest apples. But always 
in sight of the Meadow. Always close enough to run back to the safety of District 12 if trouble 

79 Longenberger



arises” (Collins, The Hunger Games 6). The districts have been instilled with the notion that their 
enclosed district is protecting them from the unidentified space surrounding them. If we exam-
ine this structure closely, however, we notice that the citizens prefer to remain in the very places 
where their enslavement simultaneously occurs. Instead of seeking refuge and freedom in the free 
space outside their districts (which would signify that they would have to leave the “safety” of their 
districts), the district citizens believe the only safe place for them is in the very site that enables 
their own enslavement. Ultimately, the layout of the entire nation of Panem, and the accompanying 
feelings of the citizens toward that layout, is used by the Capitol to perpetuate the enslavement of 
all of its districts. In the end, the physical layout of the districts does more harm than good.

Part of the social structure in Panem also includes the annual Hunger Games the Capitol puts 
on. In order to select the children who must fight in the Hunger Games, the Capitol holds a reap-
ing which chooses a boy and a girl at random from each district to be the tributes. But, the reaping 
itself does more than simply pick the tributes for each district. Inherent in the reaping itself are two 
major facets of slavery that Orlando Patterson defines, and these help create the enslavement of the 
districts. These facets are “natal alienation” and “deracination.” Patterson describes natal alienation 
as the “alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood’ and from all ‘rights’ 
or claims of birth” (7). What natal alienation entails is the fact that a slave’s social connection and 
relationship to the people of his birth and heritage are not constituted as legally binding. Being 
natally alienated means that a parent and child may still have a relationship, but that relationship 
holds no legal standing or rights. Because of this, Patterson notes, “The master [has] the power to 
remove a slave from the local community in which he or she was brought up” (6). Patterson labels 
this action as “deracination,” or the loss of native status for any person by being physically removed 
from his or her home. In this way, natal alienation provides the threat of separation, and deracina-
tion fulfills that threat by physically uprooting slaves from their homes. But even though not all 
slaves are deracinated, Patterson states that the fact that separation is possible was enough to “strike 
fear in the hearts of all slaves” (6).

In The Hunger Games, the annual reaping enforces the natal alienation and enslavement of all of 
the district citizens while also providing the threat of deracination. At any moment, a child’s name 
can be called at the reaping. Because the threat of separation is always present in the reaping itself, 
the citizens’ relationships with their children are not legally enforceable. And, since every citizen is 
natally alienated, it is at the very moment in the reaping when the child’s name is called when the 
threat of separation is finally fulfilled and the child, now a tribute, is uprooted from his home and 
taken to the Capitol. Even though not all children are deracinated, the possibility of this occurring 
still has the same effect on all the citizens of the districts. Coupled together, the natal alienation of 
the citizens and the constant threat of deracination subject the citizens of the districts to a constant 
state of terror and fear, which subjugates them into submission and leaves them completely power-
less to control and maintain their own relationships in society. These facets of slavery are created, as 
I said early, exclusively by the social structure that is the reaping.

The final element of the societal structure of Panem that perpetuates the cycle of oppression and 
enslavement in the districts is the presence of poverty and socioeconomic inequality, which leads 
impoverished citizens of the districts to take actions which put them at more risk of being selected 
for the annual Hunger Games. Poverty has long intersected with systems of slavery; those who 
study modern-day slave systems note that poverty often drives people to seek out work opportuni-
ties that may seem risky, which lead them to be taken advantage of and eventually, in some cases, to 
be enslaved. Kevin Bales notes that “while slavery may be linked to religion in one country, to caste 

80 Longenberger



or ‘race’ in a second country, and to gender in yet another country, it always reflects differences in 
economic and social power” (10). The fact that poverty and low socioeconomic status drives peo-
ple to seek opportunities that place them in a position to be enslaved is also present in the novels. 
This appears in the form of tessera in Panem’s society. When a child turns twelve, he or she can sign 
up for tessera, which is worth “a meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person.” A person 
such as Katniss can apply for tessera for each of her family members, but each time a person signs 
up for tessera, their name is entered in the reaping an extra time. People can sign up for tessera each 
year, but the entries are also cumulative. By the time Katniss is sixteen, her name is entered in the 
reaping twenty times; Gale’s name is entered forty-two times (Collins, The Hunger Games 13). At 
the surface level, this appears like a way for families in poverty to receive extra food throughout the 
year. Another function of tessera is to make the poor more likely to be called for the annual Hunger 
Games. Children of financially sound families will only have their names entered once because 
they have no need for extra food. But, since those children in poverty are driven by a need for sur-
vival, they place themselves at a higher risk of being sent to the Hunger Games and, thus, of being 
subjected to further violence in the arena. 

Another part of low socioeconomic status is the promise and lure to improve one’s circumstanc-
es in life. Every year after the boy and girl tribute have been selected, there is an option for citizens 
of the districts to volunteer. In places such as District 12, no one usually volunteers because “the 
word tribute is pretty much synonymous with the word corpse” (Collins, The Hunger Games 22). In 
these districts, children hardly ever volunteer because they have almost no chances of winning. In 
the wealthier districts, such as Districts 1 and 2, children train for the Hunger Games their entire 
lives and volunteer just so they can win the Hunger Games. Despite their improved lifestyles, even 
the members of the wealthier districts are still forced to work their entire lives, meaning they too 
want to escape their lives of enslavement. Collins never addresses their desire for volunteering, but 
one could assume it is driven by the desire to want to live in a life of luxury and pleasure for the rest 
of their lives. In the end, the volunteering functions as a societal structure that provides a hope of 
escaping the miserable conditions; coupled with the structure of tessera, which provides relief to 
struggling families, these two social structures allow the children of the districts to be more suscep-
tible to entering the annual Hunger Games and enduring further violence and oppression.

Modern-Day Implications and Importance of The Hunger 
Games Trilogy

Some may believe that Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy is purely fiction and has no 
pertinence in our daily lives, but I believe these two themes present in the trilogy inform us great-
ly about problems in our modern-day society. According to a different interview with Suzanne 
Collins, conducted by Hannah Hudson, Collins believes that “watching people being humiliated 
or brought to tears or suffering physically” has an inherent “voyeuristic thrill,” one that is com-
monly present in reality television. Collins goes on to state that there is a “potential for desensi-
tizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn’t have the 
impact it should. It all just blurs into one program” (Hudson). Collins is clearly concerned with 
the fact that viewing dramatized violence and suffering can block out the reality of war and vio-
lence in the real world. She is deeply concerned with the fact that seeing fake suffering on reality 
television shows inhibits our ability to understand and comprehend the actual suffering of human 
beings in the world today. Remembering the way the Roman spectators and the citizens of the 
Capitol became desensitized to the violence they were viewing can aid us in remaining aware of 

81 Longenberger



the actual suffering of real people enduring oppression and enslavement around the world.
Within Collins’s novels there rests a second warning about allowing certain structures within 

society to remain that could lead individuals to be enslaved. As I’ve noted, the layout of the dis-
tricts made the citizens feel like they needed to stay in their districts in order to survive and remain 
in safety. This construct was, as we have seen, a manifestation of Panem’s society and the ideas in-
stilled upon them, and when it was left intact, it persuaded more district citizens to stay where they 
could be enslaved rather than seek freedom. The poverty that was rampant in many of the districts 
also made some of the district citizens at a higher risk of going to the Hunger Games. If these social 
structures within the districts had been reformed and improved, those citizens would not have felt 
the need to place their lives on the line in order to survive. 

Another construct that is quite prevalent in many societies today is the laws that require foreign 
citizens to have their passport to leave the country. It seems like a harmless law, one that is probably 
supposed to do more good than harm, but in reality it traps individuals in slavery. In Jesse Sage and 
Liora Kasten’s book Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, many of the stories feature indi-
viduals who were trapped in foreign countries when they were enslaved because their passports 
were taken away and they could not leave the country. This construct of modern society effective-
ly prevents modern-day slaves from fleeing their employers/captors because it is illegal to do so 
without a passport. Collins’s novel warns us that if we do not change laws such as these that allow 
systems of oppression and violence to function, then the problem of slavery will not end but will 
actually continue to exist as long as these constructs are in place.

Finally, Collins’s depiction of the reaping and the annual Hunger Games, and the fact that the citi-
zens of the Capitol were completely oblivious to the suffering of the districts, reminds us of threaten-
ing social structures in the past, from the Japanese internment camps that were set up across Amer-
ica during World War II, to the concentration camps established during the Nazi Holocaust, to the 
military detention camps like Guantanamo Bay. These structures of oppression and enslavement are 
often created and sustained because the societies in which they are created either approve of their 
creation or are oblivious or unconcerned about their existence. Collins reminds us that if we do not 
recognize these systems of oppression in our world and become aware that a great violence is being 
committed, then there is no possibility of those systems of oppression and slavery being stopped. 
Thus, they will continue on indefinitely into the future and wreak havoc along the way. 

Conclusion
Estimates put the current number of slaves in our world today at 30 million worldwide. Between 

sex trafficking and child labor, there are people being enslaved in virtually every country in the world. 
There are signs of modern-day slavery in every direction we look, including literature. As we have seen 
throughout this paper, slavery is so prevalent in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy; and, from 
our analysis, we can see just how devastating it can be to become desensitized to violence and allow op-
pression to continue through current societal structures. The Hunger Games trilogy may be fiction and 
it may not include a story detailing the suffering of actual people in real enslavement, but the oppres-
sion they face mirrors that of modern-day slaves. If readers could learn to read literature and examine 
the systems of slavery in the novels they read, thus taking from them knowledge of the suffering and 
oppression that any human being can face, then perhaps we might become a generation of educated 
and insightful human beings who have the desire and will to end slavery in our own lifetime.

82 Longenberger



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83

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