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| Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
My draft has hit a bad spot, so I thought I'd get a jump on this week's postings, especially since there's a checkpoint this Friday. We're reading "literary analyses" this week, and I picked an essay by Philip Nel, called "Fantasy, Mystery, and Ambiguity." Don't be put off by the title -- it's actually about Harry Potter, or at least the first four books.
Nel makes a point that reminded me of a whole bunch of things at once. He writes, "As the series develops, it grows increasingly interested in questions of power: who has it, who has the right to exercise it over another, who has the moral authority to wield it, and how it should be exercised" (750). He goes on to talk about the political aspects of the books, and that made me think of my project. I'm not looking at politics in The Hunger Games, but it's a HUGE part of the book, if not the film. All the characters are living in a fascist dictatorship, where the people in the Capitol are wealthy and privileged, while the majority of the population (the Districts) lives on the brink of starvation and is forced to abide by the ideology of their distant rulers because the Districts have been made the scapegoats for a civil war that happened over seventy years earlier. Sounds kind of like Nazi Germany, doesn't it? And Harry Potter's world is headed in that direction in the first four books, too, what with Voldemort's supporters attacking Muggle-born wizards (I was really amazed when I realized that there are a lot of points in common between the last Harry Potter book, The Hunger Games, and the Nazis).
Since the tv was on while I was reading, I heard probably four or five political commercials before I finished the article, and I saw a connection there, too. Which was scary.
