Though Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games are both certifiable staples of the canon of contemporary young adult literature, the two best-selling novels do not, at first glance, appear to have much else in common. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is, after all, as its title would have you believe, a “diary” of sorts: it is zany Arnold “Junior” Spirit Jr.’s account of what it means to live on an Indian reservation today – and, more importantly, what it means to be Native American in the United States today. The Hunger Games, in contrast, is a work of dystopian literature; set in the fictional nation of Panem, it sees its protagonist, the recalcitrant Katniss Everdeen, compete in a brutal televised death match known as the “Hunger Games.” Contending that these novels could – or, in fact, do – share thematic roots sounds absurd, …show more content…
Medea is a symbol of bedlam and chaos, but she also symbolizes the human mind unhinged by the unhappy marriage of insuperable grief and rage. As a murderess, she epitomizes unjustifiable violence and, yet, shockingly: Junior empathizes with her. He asserts that she was simply “betrayed” and rendered “distraught by” an overwhelmingly “joyless” world. The verbs “betrayed” and “distraught” both carry incredibly negative connotations; in employing them to describe her situation, Junior emphasizes the magnitude of the unassailable agony that Medea – and, by extension, he himself – must have felt. In using the verbs “betrayed” and “distraught,” Junior also intimates that Medea’s anguish was born of either emotional or mental causes, which made it more affecting; he almost seems to imply, therefore, that bodily violence is a body’s natural – if not particularly commendable – response to infinite internal