Hunger Games Theme SPOILER ALERT!!!

The main theme in the novel the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the basic human goal of survival. At the very beginning of the novel Katniss is just trying to survive in the terrible environment of district 12. After the death of her father she had to go out on her own to hunt and bring back food for her and her family to live off of. The Capitol makes this task even harder by making hunting illegal so Katniss has to be very careful while selling her game and sneaking into the woods. She is alone in this objective until she meets a boy who also lost his father at a young age and has to survive as well. Gale and Katniss soon become hunting partners and the challenge of surviving becomes a more bearable task to accomplish. Katniss surviving in district 12 by hunting foreshadows how she will survive during the Hunger Games and how she will be able to be a real threat to the other tributes even if they are a lot stronger than she is and the fact that she can live off of the land if worse comes to worse. The theme of survival appears again and again during this novel, the next appearance it makes is when she has to do an interview with Caesar Flickerman, an interviewer of all of the tributes before they are put in the arena. Katniss is not social and the interview determines if people outside of the games will help her once she enters fighting for her life. Therefore the importance of this interview is like she is trying to survive before she even starts fighting with the other tributes. Once she enters the games there are many aspects that relate back to the main theme of survival, right at the beginning she has to run away from the other tributes so that she is not in the middle of the war zone and dead within the first moments of the games. Once she has escaped the blood bath the need to surviving never leaves her mind from that point on. From her years of hunting she has an advantage over some of the other tributes in surviving, but another aspect of surviving in this environment is luck. Throughout the games Katniss gets very lucky and lives because of it. An example of her getting really lucky is when she is up in a tree and there are a pack of tributes on the ground trying to kill her, she gets lucky when another tribute tells her of a tracker jackers’ nest (mutant wasps created by the Capitol that can kill if stung too many times). This tribute, Rue, could have easily killed her but instead she decided to help her and tell her of this nest, which allowed Katniss to escape with only a few stings. Later on in the book she is almost killed by a girl, Clove, and could have easily had a knife buried into her    throat if another tribute, Thresh, did not come to her rescue. Clove could have easily cut Katniss’ throat and been done with it, but Thresh came to the rescue since he thought he owed Katniss something for helping out his fellow district tribute, Rue. This is also the reason that Thresh lets Katniss live after Clove was killed in a very brutal fashion. The idea of survival is a basic human instinct that our bodies have made us experts at; whether it is our ability to think, use tools, and the adrenaline that rushes through our bodies during moments of emergency. Throughout the games, all of these aspects can be seen from Katniss, from her outsmarting many of her fellow tributes to her use of snares to catch animals to eat. Finally at the end of the book Katniss finds out that the Capitol is not very happy with the final action that she did while she was in the arena and that an uprising might be in the making. This moment foreshadows into the next book that there will be more challenges that she will have to survive through.