ABSTRACT
Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy and M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts both rely on the concept of last hope embodied by a teenager, but they interpret hope in fundamentally different ways because of the world the stories are set in.
In Collins’ fictional world, the Hunger Games are organised around the idea of tying together the deaths of many and the survival of one from many, suggesting that one person’s annual, symbolic triumph over death may ensure hope for survival even in the harshest circumstances; such an arrangement, however, also reveals the reality that allows a person to hope for no more. When, thanks to Katniss and Peeta’s shared victory, hope becomes extended and promises change instead of mere survival, being the last person to survive in the arena becomes a symbolic role that helps a whole society return to a more democratic politics and discard the artificial lifestyle of the Capitol. The Hunger Games series focuses on the context of politics, and as politics has its foundations in theatricality/performance/deception/artificiality the annual Games are like yearly, symbolic performances of Panem’s everyday reality. The Games are thus repeatable; and from this characteristic it follows that the Games may prove educational and produce sooner or later someone who understands their logic well enough to fight them successfully. As long as the primary context is politics, therefore, human relations and interactions are put in the limelight and educate us about opportunities to take to reorganise ourselves as a human community.
However, when society is positioned in a world where the fight is not between two groups of humans but between humans and a world that threatens humanity’s extinction, the whole world becomes an arena — and the fight in it is unrepeatable. The last girl, in this context, signifies hope of various kinds: Melanie’s body is a hope for medicine to stop humanity’s zombification and to return to ‘normalcy’, a state of the world before the zombies appeared; but instead Melanie chooses to reinterpret hope from a posthuman position, discarding the anthropocentric view that Collins’ fiction maintains. In the two works we may find several common motifs and themes, including the themes of people’s disrespect for nature, the transformation of the human body and humanity, children’s suffering for their parents’ sins, the extended family, the motif of the arena that highlights how hope is a death-and-life question in the world where these characters try to survive, and even the theme of monsterisation/zombification. In my chapter I am going to focus on comparing how these themes and motifs emerge, how they reflect on the contemporary world that these works project onto imaginary ones, and how the similarities and the distinction in what these themes and motifs display depend on the girl who embodies last hope.
