Abstract

Dystopian narratives have time and again emerged as both a reaction to contemporary horrors in any society, and a futuristic warning against certain practices left unchecked. One of the primary features of dystopian narratives is the carefully constructed background against which the story unfolds. This background often consists of a disaster or post-disaster area, which houses the dystopian society in question. Just as dystopia is often the direct aftermath of having to sustain utopian façades, the barren land - encumbered by a recent or near past disaster, often bears the brunt of the seemingly perfect society of order and structure, hiding the ‘ugly’ features of the utopian ideal in many a dystopian narrative. The many characteristics of the barren land, a space that is purported to be unfavourable for people to even live in, give said space a persona of its own, which can be read as a metaphor which runs parallel to the lives of the protagonists of those narratives. This article aims to see how the post-disaster barren land depicted in dystopian literature often acts as a character complete in its own right, through a close reading of the following spaces - District 13 from the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins and the Wilds in the Delirium trilogy by Lauren Oliver.