The Hunger Games Literary Analysis Essay

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The Hunger Games Literary Analysis Essay 1400-1700 words

Literary Analysis Essay                                         

The goal, as always, is to get specific, and then to fully explain and develop how that specific idea works in the text as you understand it.

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Hunger Games Literary Analysis Essay Prompt Options

Choose one of the following prompts about which to write your essay.

Choose a character and analyze them according to what we learned about psychology and psychoanalysis. Make an argument about what you think that character’s primary challenges are, and use textual evidence to support that argument. Don’t refer to every concept from our psychology/psychoanalysis discussion; narrow it down to the few ideas you think most affect the character’s behaviors.
What/who do you think the primary antagonist(s) is(are) in this novel? How do they work against Katniss and/or other characters in the text?
One of Katniss’ struggles in this novel is that between independence and interdependence? Why/how does she struggle and which helps her survive?
Does Katniss have a tragic flaw? If yes, how does it work against her in the text?
What is the role of love in this text? Why is it complicated?
Why do the people of Panem participate in these barbaric rituals? How does the government make the citizens complicit in the horrors of their dystopian society?
Choose one or more symbols and explore its role in the setting, character development, and/or conflict of the novel.
Katniss and Peeta, the female and male protagonists of The Hunger Games, reverse traditional masculine and feminine gender roles, with her out in the woods as a hunter and him at home baking in the kitchen; likewise, Peeta later spends much of their time together wounded and helpless in the cave while she protects and provides for him. To what extent does Peeta’s symbolic emasculation work with or against the dystopic view Suzanne Collins presents? What do you make of the fact that Collins never once mentions gender?
The teenage years are a time when young people develop hormonally and expend a lot of energy thinking about/having/avoiding sex. In the world of The Hunger Games, though, this doesn’t appear to be the case for Katniss. She is largely oblivious to her own romantic entanglements, and her relationships with both Peeta and Gale are extremely chaste by contemporary standards. Even within the arena, where social norms are suspended, author Collins has replaced the traditional sexual exploration that takes place in young adulthood with violence and aggression. The plot consists of teens killing one another rather than coupling with each other. In your interpretation, is this true and, if so, what is the reader understand about the relationship between sex and violence as presented in this book?
Hunger Games Literary Analysis Essay Requirements

For all prompts, write a well-developed essay in which you answer the prompt question(s) with a clear argument and use support directly from the text of The Hunger Games. Assume your reader has already read The Hunger Games, which means you don’t have to summarize the plot of the book. Jump right into your argument as if your reader already knows what happens.

For this essay, writers will:

Develop a clear and arguable thesis statement in response to one prompt.
Use clearly structured paragraphs with specific topic sentences. This is an essay so it should have an introduction, body, and conclusion, though the number of body paragraphs will be determined by your specific topic and argument.
Not summarize more than small bits of information. Summary always serves the purpose of your analysis. Assume the reader of your essay has also read the book. One way to avoid summary is to always ask how/what this piece of information matters to your argument. Why does this bit of text you are referring to matter to your thesis/interpretation? How does it affect the characters, the conflict, the climax of the novel?
Cite examples and quote from the book to support your interpretations; this is not a research essay so you don’t (necessarily) need other sources. Other sources may actually distract from your argument, so use them judiciously.
All of the words in this essay should be your own, or should be short, quoted passages from the book. A literary analysis is all about the source text, which in this case, is The Hunger Games. Your essay should be source-text dense. What this means is you should be referring to specifics of the text / and or quoting from the text, in every paragraph.
Use MLA in-text citations when quoting The Hunger Games. You should put the page number from which you took the quote in parenthesis (9), or, if you’re using a digital copy of the book, put the chapter number in parenthesis (ch 15). If only cite The Hunger Games, you do not need a Works Cited page. If you cite any sources other than The Hunger Games for this essay, you should do a Works Cited page.
Do not quote from websites that summarize or interpret the text for you (including but not limited to: Bookrags, Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, Shmoop, Wikipedia, Gradesaver, Enotes.)
Your examples should be in chronological order—over the essay as a whole and within each paragraph.
Your examples should span the whole of the text. You are demonstrating here, partially, that you read and understood the book, which means that all of your examples should not be from the same chapter or same part of the text. If you stop citing examples at chapter 4, the reader will assume you did not finish reading the book.
Work this draft through multiple revisions. Save the copy-editing for last draft.
Demonstrate academic writing proficiency.
Use MLA formatting.

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The Hunger Games Literature Essay Samples

Last Updated on January 29, 2025

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