The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games is an impressive novel--it has all the elements of a good novel and executes on them well.  In terms of structure, I believe it actually has two complimentary dramatic structures which reach different audiences--one about survival and the other about love.  The two converge at the resolution and lead to a satisfying finish.

The four parts of structure are:  set-up, response, attack & resolution.  Here is my analysis of the two structures:

Survival Story

1. Set-up:  Katniss volunteers for the games in her sister's place.  She thinks she is just fodder for the games and has no chance until she loses her temper in training which earns her the highest score of all the tributes.  After that happens, she now knows she has a chance and changes her outlook on the games.

2. Response:  Now that she believes she has a chance, all of her actions are aimed at improving her odds:  she plays along in the interview, she runs from the cornucopia as instructed, she hides and bides her time.  But during this portion of the book, she is only responding to events.  That changes when she is cornered in a tree seemingly with no escape.  Then a fellow tribute, Rue, gives her the idea of unleashing a nest of killer hornets on the tributes who have her trapped.  She does this and thus begins the attack phase.

3. Attack:  Katniss is literally on the attack in this portion, looking to kill other tributes or hurt their chances of survival by destroying their supplies.  She forms an alliance with Rue.  She also forms an alliance with Peeta when the Games announce that tributes from the same district can both win.  Here the two structures begin to come together because Peeta is hurt and she must help nurse him back to health.  The resolution is set up when the leaders of the Games promise to provide something each of the remaining tributes need desperately at the cornucopia.  Katniss goes to the cornucopia to get medicine for Peeta and for the final showdown with the other tributes.

4. Resolution:  Katniss gets the supplies for Peeta but is then trapped with some of the other tributes at the cornucopia by intelligent wolves.  She battles both the wolves and other tributes and is ultimately victorious.  Now that it is just her and Peeta, they believe they have won.  But then the leaders of the Games change the rules yet again and announce there can be only one winner.  Rather than fight one another, they decide to both commit suicide.  Before they can kill themselves, the leaders of the games relent and allow them both to win.

Love Story

1. Set-up:  The set up on the love story is slow because we don't know up front that this will be an important element.  However, the background provided is necessary for the reveal later on.  Peeta helps Katmiss when she and her family is starving by giving her a loaf of bread even though he is punished by his parents for it.  Peeta is nice to her during the training, but she thinks it is part of a deception to make it easier to kill her during the games.  The set-up ends when Peeta professes his love for Katniss during the interviews.  Now Katniss needs to decide if she believes him, and how she feels about him

2. Response:  For the love story, most of the response is in Katniss thinking back on what she knows about Peeta and wondering if perhaps he really does love her.  The response ends when Peeta deliberately helps her survive after the hornet attack in a moment when he could have easily killed her.  Now Katniss knows he is trying to help her and realizes he really does love her, even though she doesn't want to admit it to herself.


3. Attack:  The love story begins in earnest when Katniss finds Peeta injured and starts to nurse him back to health.  They act romantically, even kissing, but Katniss is still mostly just playing the part to get help from Haymitch, her sponsor.  She does begin to care more deeply about Peeta in this section, although it comes across more nurturing than romantic for most of the time.

4. Resolution:  Katniss goes to the cornucopia to get medicine for Peeta to save his life and the two stories converge.

For me, the survival story was what kept me reading.  But I can see some readers focusing more on the love story, especially if they're rooting for Peeta to get the girl.  However, for me, the love story never took off because Katniss never really fell for Peeta.  Nonetheless, the decision to have two separate story structures which overlap and come together in the end is a great technique and one I hope to use some day in my own stories.