Blog Post #3

Incarceron is a dystopia. (dystopia: n. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding. - Dictionary.com) Incarceron is a prison that is a cruel world to its prisoners. After the Years of Rage that tore apart society and the world, society in the book has been put back together, thanks in large part to throwing a large portion of the trouble-making population into the prison that is Incarceron. Incarceron is monitered and controlled by a person of power in the outside world by an official who is called the Warden. In the story, the Warden happens to be Claudia's cold-hearted father.

A book that has recently been made into a wildly successful movie that is about a dystopian world is The Hunger Games. In the Hunger Games' world, society has been rebuilt under a powerful and repressive government that holds 12 provinces/villages in check through sacrificing two teenagers each year to an "entertainment" tournament where each competitor fights with the others to the death in a created battle arena. The last one alive wins.

So? What's the point in comparing these two books you ask? Well I thought that it would be interesting to compare two popular books that I have read and enjoyed and then use my intellectual capacity to compare these two stories in ways that no one would ever dream of. Well, actually, Mr. Costello requested that his English 11 students relate their characters, people, or events in their independent reading books to ones in other books, movies, or TV shows. But doesn't the former reflect so much more positively on me?

But I digress. In both Incarceron and The Hunger Games, the main characters (Claudia in the former and Katniss in the latter) rebel against the rulers of the dystopias and take matters into their own hands to change their flawed societies. They each also find support for their rebellious actions from both friends and their peers. Blood is shed in each of the books as Claudia and Katniss both fight for what they believe in, or in some ways, their very survival. By the end of both Incarceron and The Hunger Games, both Claudia and Katniss have left deep impacts on their societies and have ignited changes in both of their worlds.