SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't finished the series you may want to wait to read this.
In celebration of the Hunger Games coming out this weekend I thought
this would be an appropriate review. This is a segment of a paper i had
to write in making a connection between psychology and novels. This is
my own interpretation of Katniss and her personality. Let me know what
you think, if you agree or if you see Katniss differently.
The Purpose of Psychology in Creative Writing
As a self declared author and an avid reader, I have explored many
worlds and unknown places and tried with little success to create my
own. For years I have been drawn to books and captivated by their
stories. I take pride in my ability to find amazing works and read all
of them without hindrance. However, recently I have discovered what
makes a book so enticing that it could captivate millions of people all
over the world. It takes is the proper use of psychology. Being able to
create a world and characters that reflect true emotions of believable
or unbelievable behaviors and feelings can be aided and perfected with
the use of psychology. Psychology can assist the readers and authors in
discovering truths about themselves by means of self-analysis, seeing
through a different perspective, using symbols and underlying messages
to teach, and explore to best and worst of human behavior.
A book
that is able to combine all those factors is truly a masterpiece and
there are countless out there. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare,
Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte, and The Chronicles of Narnia by
C.S. Lewis are all distinguished works capturing the good, the bad, the
disturbing, and the crazy of human behavior. All of which are symbolic
and give us a new world and perspective to see through. They are known
throughout the world and have been for many years. However, what has
become an increasingly hard feat is to create a piece embodying all the
characteristics of a great novel in our day and age. One such book is
The Hunger Games created by Suzanne Collins, which is about a teenage
heroine named Katniss Everdeen.
Katniss is a survivor. The first
time I read her story, I saw her as a very simplistic character with
very little depth. However, after learning about the connections between
English and Psychology I read the book again and came to the
realization that she is in fact a very complex character. Katniss has
very simple views and beliefs about herself and the world she lives in.
It is this initial view that leads many to misjudge her character.
Despite all her suffering she successfully provides the basic needs for
her family. Food, shelter and protection are Katniss’s primary focus;
they form her identity and give her purpose. She is born into a gruesome
world and from the start she is put into circumstances that would cause
many to falter and in her world, means certain death. She prides
herself on being independent and the proctor of her mother, sister, and
the people she feels an obligation or loyalty towards. Yet even thou she
has a solid foundation for what she believes and what her thoughts are
focused on, her actually behaviors counter everything she herself
values.
Katniss has strikingly little self-awareness, she doesn’t
seem to grasp that her actions counter her beliefs. She puts such an
importance on survival, but on many occasions she unnecessarily puts
herself in life threatening situations out of unknown obligations that
she herself is unconscious of. By chance she overhears a conversation
regarding herself and is shocked by how she is perceived. This
revelation begins her process of self-analysis and introspection.
She is confronted with the idea that she is cold and passionless.
Underneath everything she only cares of the survival of her sister and
of herself. At first it is a hard truth to except but as she realizes
the underlying truth of this perception she also understands that this
is not who she truly is. She reaches a moment were she is so confused
by her own emotion and how she feels, the only thing she can think of
doing is to shut everything out. Over the years, Katniss has developed
the survival skill to shut her emotions away, which lead most to believe
she was cold and uncaring. In the pinnacle moment when she sees her
sister die she was forced to come to the absolute realization that her
purpose has been destroyed. Confronting her emotions basically left her
mentally incapacitated for many months. Katniss’s world and identity
has been shattered and needs to be reshaped. This process started with
suicide attempts but ultimately culminated in a stronger person.
When the reader is first introduced to Katniss, we see a young girl bent
on survival at all cost, which is a dramatic change to the conclusion
of her story where she tries to kill herself. Katniss attempts are
stopped and she is ultimately imprisoned for her own safety. When it all
fell apart she felt her only solution appeared to be suicide. How
does a person radically change from one value set to another? It is my
impression that because Katniss had such little self-awareness or
understanding of her own feelings, when such an unexpected tragedy hit,
she crumbled. The reader realizes that Katniss never put an importance
on her own survival even though her outward actions appeared to
demonstrate the opposite. Ultimately her true driving force was the
survival of her sister. She unconsciously connected her survival with
her sister because if she died then so might her sister. Katniss was the
provider and the proctor and if she was absent her belief is that her
sister would be uncared for and eventually die.
As a result
Katniss’s story ends with her devastated and trying to find her way back
with the help of a few friends and some much need counseling. It is a
bittersweet end for Katniss, she is finally able to understand herself
and is aware of her true thoughts and feelings but lost much in the
process. The gains the reader utilizes by reading this book or any other
book is exceptionally explained by Karen Horney, “The analyst/author’s
general task is to help the patient/reader to recognize himself and to
reorient his life as far as the patient/reader himself deems it
necessary.”(Horney113) To use self-analysis in reading is to create a
safe environment for one to explore another persons or characters
experiences and personal hardships and relate to them. By doing so one
can come to whatever revelation they are ready for.
-Charly Booth
