Mockingjay - Structure, Language and Style

“Mockingjay” Structure, language and style

Mockingjay is the last book of the Hunger Games trilogy written by Suzanne Collins, preceded by The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. The trilogy is based on a post-apocalyptic world where the remains of human population form a country named Panem. The country was divided into 13 districts and the Capitol which commanded the whole country, after an uprising occurred in district 13 the Capitol destroyed it and decided to organize the Hunger Games where two young people from each district should participate in a contest where only one could come out alive.

Mockingjay is the story of a second uprising against the Capitol lead by the, thought extinct, district 13 and Katniss Everdeen, the main character of the trilogy, and how it develops. The book has a clear structure divided in introduction, body and conclusion, the normal structure every written piece has. The introduction tells of the story of how Katniss manages to escape her second hunger games with the help of the revolution and how they organize to take on the Capitol, the body id conformed by the process of revolution against the Capitol and Katniss’ problems throughout the whole process, and the conclusion tells us how the revolution ends and how Katniss’ life looks into the future. And the book’s purpose, just as any other novel out there is mainly entertain with a hint of a persuasive purpose to avoid the situation that happens throughout the whole trilogy.

For the language and style part of the analysis we are going to evaluate the presence of some resources writers can use to make their work better. Some of the characteristics to be analyzed are: If it presents anecdotes, descriptions, quoting, emotive language, facts or statistics, and the narrative voice.

The story does have anecdotes, it presents many memories brought back by Katniss when anything related to the hunger games is brought up, most of the characters that had participated at the hunger games and came out alive had stories to tell about their experience and how awful it was to participate in a cold-blooded killing just to entertain the Capitol’s citizens and avoid future revolutions. Peeta who was “hijacked” by the capitol has to be treated using good memories of his past to bring him back to normal, so in the whole process we have a lot of anecdotes present.

Descriptions and facts are used to apply certain sense of realness to the novel making it look like if the events had already happened in real life and the numbers were part of history, and descriptions set us up in the desired setting by the writer to create an impact on the reader. Descriptions are often used in the novel to describe the aftermath of the ongoing war between the rebels and the Capitol, a clear description is made when Katniss first returns to her former district to find only destroyed buildings covered in ash after the bombings. Because this is a novel, not a non-fiction book it does not present real facts, but it presents fact that happen inside the book’s world. An example is the uprising, the rebels have taken over Panem and are about to take on the Capitol to regain control of the country.