Monday, January 9, 2012
Mockingjay :O1"A new sensation begins to germinate inside me. But it takes until I am standing on a table, waving my final good-byes to the hoarse chanting of my name, to define it. Power. I have a kind of power I never knew I possessed. Snow knew it, as soon as I held out those berries. Plutarch knew when he rescued me from the arena. And Coin knows now. So much so that she must publicly remind her people that I am not in control."( .Collins).
Katniss never thought anything of herself. She had a lot to say about how Panem was and the way that it ran. But she knew that she had to keep her mouth shout or she, including her family, would suffer. The government has always controlled Katniss (and the rest of Panem) like it was a puppeteer. Katniss was a puppet in their show and they could do anything they pleased with her. At least this is what she thought. She never thought that she could stand up to them and cut off the strings. She never knew that she had the ability to make a different and break Panem free of the government’s reign. She’s not capable of understanding her power. And even if she did understand it, she would not know how to control it because when Katniss gets pushed around, she eventually pushes back. There is no way in telling what she can do.
Here is where Katniss's "power" starts growing inside her, like a flower. Everyone else has known all along: all the other people in positions of power and authority recognized that same power in her. She's the only one who didn't. In other words, she didn't know her own strength, but now she's beginning to find out. And that only makes her more dangerous.
The government had planned out Katniss’ life for as long as she can remember. She always did follow the law and be the person that the government wanted her to be but it is obvious that it changed when she was put into the Hunger Games. The Games allowed her to see that she is just a piece of the game for a larger game. Her moves were limited and restricted. One small wrong move can trigger horrible events. After District 12 was demolished, she finally realizes that she doesn’t want to be a piece in their game nor a part of it. Everything the government is, she saw, is a lie. There is no way of realizing what the government is capable of doing but she knew that she had to take them down in order to save the rest of Panem. She’s fighting for her own human rights and Panem’s rights.
Labels: DJ1, GOVERNMENT, MOCKINGJ, P2
WHTC @10:32 PM!
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The Hunger Games :O1"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. Eventually I understood this would only lead us to more trouble. So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts. Do my work quietly in school. Make only polite small talk in the public market...even at home, where I am less pleasant, i avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food shortages, or The Hunger Games. Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?" (6 .Collins)
It sort of sucks living like them in District 12, actually, every district. Unlike us, it is obvious that they do not have freedom of speech. Katniss knew from experience from her childhood that she cannot say anything bad about the people that run Panem. She learned that bad things will happen because of the way her mother reacted. The fact that her mother wouldn’t let her say anything negative bad about the rulers or her opinion on it proves that District 12, along with the other Districts of Panem, lives in a dystopian world. They live in a specific District that is fenced and barbed-wired off from the rest of the world. They have a specific job in the district, which is coal mining. They have cameras watching them giving them little to do privacy. They live in such a conformed world that they don’t really think of it. They just know that they cannot upset the people at the top of the tier.
This passage specifically sets the rest of the book because we now know that they cannot act out or do anything that is frowned upon. The author Collins uses an allusion in the passage (Katniss bringing up a childhood memory) and focuses a lot on the idea of conformity. As the readers, we can see that District 12 is one of the Districts that is suffering from poverty and the fact that they might end up like District 13 if anything out of the ordinary was to occur, gone and destroyed.
To me and I‘m pretty sure to everyone else, to be human is to have the freedoms that we have. We do as we like and we speak what is on our minds without the fear that something bad is going to happen to use if anyone hears us. But not to the people in District 12. I think it’s obvious that Panem, as a whole, lives in a world where they are not treated like human-beings. Sure they live but they don’t have the rights to express themselves or anything. Come on, they basically live in a city jail, they’re fenced in and are expected to do nothing about that. That’s not how human beings are supposed to live like. To be human, we have to have our alienated rights.
Labels: DJ1, GOVERNMENT, P2, TGH
WHTC @12:32 PM!
