Reading Response (The Year of the Flood)

Maybe I was being overzealous, but while reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood” I couldn’t help but draw conclusions between Atwood’s Toby and Suzanne Collins’ Katniss. Both women find themselves in a situation that isolates them and in which they must draw strength and endurance to survive in the dystopian world they inhabit. Both women have been self-sufficient because of absent parents and both know how to wield weapons because of their fathers. The existence of gender roles in both worlds are questionable at best, but both women do not concede to our modern world’s traditional role of a woman.

From a macro point of view, both Toby and Katniss find themselves in catastrophes that they are told are honorable. Toby is told by the Gardeners that survival of the waterless flood is an honor and responsibility given by God to replenish the Earth with his animals and plants. Katniss is told by the Capitol that it is an honor to fight and represent her district in the games. However, it is clear that neither situation seems favorable or pleasant. Atwood’s description of Painball is also similar to the structure of the Hunger Games because it is a place of condemnation: a place where people go to die. Painball features a fight to the death in a forest, which is screened publicly for all to watch just like the Hunger Games. Come out alive of either and the victors are numbingly changed and respected. (Although in Painball, one is respected and feared while in the Hunger Games, one is respected and celebrated).

It’s a spontaneous parallel, but I’ll continue to keep it in mind while reading devouring “The Year of the Flood”.