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The Hunger Games Theme- Identity

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Submitted By TinZieger
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What makes your identity? Is it your past, your family, your hopes, dreams, fears? It is all that and more. Your identity makes up who you are. It is always growing and ever-changing. Your identity is what makes you human. Finding it can be a struggle, maintaining it can be even harder. Katniss and Peeta in The Hunger Games were two examples of finding and holding onto your identity. Katniss was the girl who had to grow up to fast. She had to learn how to provide for her family, to be strong. Katniss thought to do this she had to create a wall to hold back all the childish things that were apart her. She put on a mask to grow up but to also protect herself from those who would wish to abuse her innocence. The mask, the wall they kept her safe but she lost a part of herself in the process. Then there was Peeta, a very straight forward guy who never beat around the bush. He knew who he was; he had no walls like Katniss. Instead Peeta had fears. Fears of losing himself, fears of being a pawn, a toy. He does not want The Capital to own him to change him. He wanted to live his life as who he was not what they wanted him to be. Katniss and Peeta’s journey to find and hold onto their identity are very different but at the same time they are very much alike. The road to identity can be tough but it is a road we all must take to find ourselves.
Katniss grew up in the Seam of District 12, the less desirable part of town. Living in the Seam Katniss quickly learned what hunger was. Never having enough to eat, Katniss and her father often broke the rules to hunt for food in the woods. The woods were always more of a home to Katniss then the Seam. It was a place where she could open up and let people in because no one was watching. Katniss liked hunting it came naturally to her, she would bring “food home on a daily basis, most of it was fresh.”(310). She would rather hunt then

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