A Textual Analysis of The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins’ favorite adjectives, adverbs, and ways of starting a sentence.
Photo by Murray Close/Lionsgate, Inc.
This weekend, millions of preteens will flock to theaters to take in the Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire, just as millions of preteens flocked to each of the five Twilight movies.
For the most part, however, these will not be the same people. Of the
tens of millions who identify themselves on Facebook as fans of either
of the two series, less than 20 percent are fans of both. Though both
series are set in fantasy worlds and feature female leads, readers and
moviegoers seem to ally themselves with either Team Stephenie or Team
Suzanne, but not both.
Why might a reader take a shine to one series and not the other? The content, of course, differs considerably: Twilight is filled with fantasy romance, Hunger Games
with fantasy violence. But what about the authors’ approach to writing?
Do their word choices, sentence structures, and other elements of their
prose differ significantly? Is loving The Hunger Games but not Twilight a matter of style as well as substance?
To answer this question, I could have read all of the books and
offered my opinion on the authors’ respective styles. But that’s so
unscientific. (Also, who has the time?) Instead, I conducted a
comprehensive textual analysis of the best-selling series. And to
benchmark the comparison between Meyer and Collins, I decided to throw
into the mix another wildly popular young adult series: Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling.
“Textual analysis” sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite
simple—a better term for it might be “counting words.” In 1963,
statisticians Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace published one of the
most famous “counting words” papers of all time when they determined,
through analysis of word frequencies, that James Madison most likely
wrote 10 of the anonymously penned Federalist Papers.
Using similar methods, but with help from a modern computer, which
makes the “counting” portions of a “counting words” study much easier to
perform, I conducted an equivalent analysis of the fantasy series in
question.
Once the words have been counted, the most obvious question to ask is: Which words are used most frequently by each author? But this returns uninteresting results, as basic words like the, a, and and
turn up most often in every author's work. The more interesting
question is not which words are used most frequently, but which words
are used most frequently in comparison to similar authors—that is, which words are most distinctive to a given author’s work. While studying the Federalist Papers, Mosteller and Wallace found that Hamilton used the conjunction while, as opposed to Madison, who preferred whilst,
a distinctive word choice that, in combination with others, could be
used to tell the writers apart. Below is a table listing the most
distinctive adjectives used by Collins, Meyer, and Rowling. Words that
were used by only one author or less than 10 times total between the
three authors are not included in the lists, as they might only appear
because they’re so rare, not because they’re characteristic of an
author’s writing.
And below is a list of most common -ly adverbs by author.
These lists give us a sense of the authors’ respective proclivities and reflect the general tone of each series. The Hunger Games
is a technical dystopia relying on detailed descriptions of the action
(thus the prevalence of words like “intensely” and “electronic”). Twilight is
wrapped up in emotion (thus “anxiously,” “unwilling,” and
“unreadable”—the last is typically used to describe a character’s
expression). Harry Potter is an exploration of a world by turns
wondrous and frightening (thus “dreamily,” “terrified”). Collins’
adjectives are often used in a utilitarian manner, to describe processes
(as in “One of the heaviest days of betting is the opening, when the initial
casualties come in.”). Meyer, meanwhile, is more likely to use her
adjectives to describe people (as in “he asked in his silken, irresistible voice”).
There are interesting patterns and contrasts among the authors to
observe at the sentence level as well. The table below shows the top 10
most used complete sentences by each author.
Textual analysis has its limitations, of course, but word counting
can illuminate the tendencies of writers in a way that word reading may
not. Not all of Collins’ tics will be on display in this weekend’s movie
version, but if you go, don’t be surprised if you see Katniss
“repeatedly” make “last-ditch” efforts to save her skin when “something
is wrong.”
Of course, each series is made up of individual books, and there are
variations within a series as well. Applying the same methodology to
just the Hunger Games trilogy, I isolated the most distinctive
adjectives for each of the three books. What I found was a transition
from “weak,” “wild,” and “furious” in The Hunger Games (in which Katniss must endure the Hunger Games competition) to “mental,” “physical,” and “ridiculous” in Catching Fire (in which Katniss must handle both a second competition and a rebellion) to “glad,” “lucky,” and “funny” in Mockingjay
(in which Katniss struggles through a series of unfortunate events but
ultimately finds a measure of peace). In other ways, however, Collins’
books are remarkably consistent: The three books have a word count of
roughly 101,200, 101,900, and 102,700, indicating she sticks to a
precision formula for young adult success. By comparison, none of the four Twilight books have a word count within 10,000 words of one another, and the last Harry Potter book is more than twice as long as the first.
Like the distinctive word lists, these sentences suggest something
about each author’s style. Rowling’s betray her reliance on suspense:
“Harry looked around,” “He waited,” “Harry stared.” (A list of her most
frequently used sentences could be repurposed into a script for an
absurdist play called Waiting for Voldemort.) Meyer’s
sentences—“I sighed,” “He sighed”—show a text focused on the emotional
lives of her characters. Collins’ declarative sentences telegraph her
books’ relatively spare descriptions of the action.
Looking at Meyer’s sentences, you get the sense that she may be using
similar sentences again and again—a pitfall, perhaps, of writing a
series of such length. To determine the relative repetitiveness of each
author, I first made a list of the 50 most common three-word sentence
openings each author used throughout her work. For example, Collins’
three most common openings were “I can see,” “I try to,” and “I have
to.” Then I calculated the percentage of all sentence openings (not necessarily the whole sentence) that come from each author's most used opening list:
J.K. Rowling: 2.35 percent
Suzanne Collins: 2.69 percent
Stephenie Meyer: 4.42 percent
Clearly, Meyer’s sentence variety is lacking compared to Collins and
Rowling. But in her defense, repeatedly starting sentences off the same
way doesn’t mean the prose is bad—it just means it’s repetitive.
Hemingway uses the same 50 openings (“There was a,” “He did not”) in 5.3
percent of all sentences in The Sun Also Rises.
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