The Handmaids Tale By Margaret Atwood And Catching Fire By...

â€Å"Dystopia is an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad typically in a totalitarian or an environmentally degraded one† (www.oxforddictionaries.com).The text, The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins deal with the main idea of societal restraint. Both authors portray a protagonist who is living in a totalitarian society. The protagonists in both novels have harsh limitations which they must abide to. The authors use setting, oppression, and symbolism as restraint for societal control. Setting is a demonstration of restraint because in both novels the city/district has a barrier, which limits the movement of the citizens. Oppression demonstrates restraint because the society is†¦show more content†¦It models the conventions of dystopia by using setting as a restraint for the society in the novels. In The Handmaids Tale the narrator, Offred, has desires which cannot be fulfilled due to the restraint over he r. For example, one of the restraints over all the citizens of Gilead is that they cannot read, so they use pictures to represent things. Another example from The Handmaids Tale is in the beginning of the book, it’s when Offred is talking about her past life. â€Å"The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and weren’t allowed out, except for our field walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field, which was enclosed now by a chain link fenced topped with barbed wire† (Atwood 4). The citizens who are staying at the place described as a gymnasium, have limitations to where they are allowed to go. This is done by the ruler of Gileadean society because he does not want the society to feel truly free. The ruling power does not want the citizens to go beyond the limits of the district/area. Similarly in Catching Fire citizens of Panem are separated into different districts. There are thirteen districts and the main character Katniss lives in district 12. Early in the text Katniss was illegally hunting, for food. â€Å"By the time I make it back through the fence that surrounds district 12, the sun is well up. As always I listen a moment, but there is no telltale of electrical