Contradiction through the ages : interplay of politics in literature and reality in light of nineteen eighty-four and The Hunger Games

Abstract

The claim that a democratic state may make about its ‘advanced’ ways of ‘governing’ is where my research interest starts. Having lived in a faulty system all our lives we fail to notice the wrong being committed all around us. However, when we look not at just our personal lives, but at the bigger picture from perhaps miles away we can see all the factors that have caused the social system to break down. Novelists George Orwell and Suzanne Collins take us on such a journey through their respective books: Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Hunger Games. These novels unhinge us from our society and place us at a more neutral position so that we may see beyond our limits and comprehend the gravity of the matter. I have positioned the chapters of this paper so that they function like a telescope: one part coming out of the other, but helping us understand in depth the manipulations that autocratic governments of the novel take to in order to keep their positions of power, regardless of time and continent. This paper will look into the subtle power play at work in modern, democratic nations and show how fictions respond to reality. As a part of my research I have come to see that the tools that the governments generally wield in order to maintain their power-politics are such as ‘surveillance’ and ‘propaganda’, manipulation and distortion of ‘history’ and ‘homogenization’ of people in order to enforce one rigid constitution over everyone without any opposition from them. To look at these issues or interplays more accurately, I have incorporated Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and their notions on power and manipulation. Finally, I will be finishing off by turning the spotlight on some of our own democratic governments and how they are no better than the manipulative autocratic regimes that have been criticized in the novels.