The Girl Who Was on Fire Read online

  In many ways, this is a compelling idea, but I think that giving in to this line of thinking can be dangerous, because there is so much more to Katniss than her relationships with Peeta and Gale, and if this were a book about a boy who takes his brother’s place at that first reaping, I wonder if we would all be sitting around talking about who he should be with, rather than who we think he should be. Katniss herself seems to resent the idea that her entire personality boils down to a romantic decision—in Catching Fire, she feels sickened when Haymitch tells her that she’ll never be able to do anything but live “happily ever after” with Peeta. She hardens herself against the very idea of marriage until she “recoil[s] at even the suggestion of marriage or a family” (Catching Fire). And in Mockingjay , in the aftermath of Prim’s death, when Katniss goes to Haymitch for help and he greets her by asking if she’s having more “boy trouble,” she is devastated that this is what he thinks of her, cut to her core that while her entire life is imploding, the closest thing she has to a father acts like her single biggest dilemma is deciding who she loves.

  In typical Katniss style, she states that she is unsure why Haymitch’s words hurt her so much, but I have my own theory, one that says that Katniss knows that the world—and many of the trilogy’s readers—reduce her to that one thing—romance—and that she expects better of those who know her best.

  Like Haymitch.

  And—if we’ve taken the time as readers to dig deep enough—like us.

  The Symbolic Katniss

  Even though I’ve already argued that Katniss uses the masks she wears to keep other people at bay, I think at least one of those masks is a good to place to start when looking for clues about the girl underneath. Long before District 13 asks Katniss to officially take up the mantle of Mockingjay, she identifies with the animal in question on her own. She sings, they sing back. They’re a product of the Capitol, and even before our heroine steps foot in the arena, so is she. Mockingjays are adaptive, and, as Katniss notes, the Capitol severely underestimated the species’ desire to survive.

  At the end of Catching Fire, in a daze from having been violently extracted from the arena, Katniss makes what is perhaps the strongest statement of her own identity in the entire series: “The bird, the pin, the song, the berries, the watch, the cracker, the dress that burst into flames. I am the mockingjay. The one that survived despite the Capitol’s plans. The symbol of the rebellion.” It seems that Katniss’ entire life—or at the very least, her life since she took Prim’s place at the reaping—has been leading to this, as her tiny acts of bravery and compassion and cunning spark a revolution. For once, Katniss is aware of exactly what she symbolizes and how her actions have led to this moment—and yet, Katniss herself is no more of a rebel than an actual mockingjay, an animal who never thought of thwarting the Capitol and merely wanted to survive.

  Katniss is, at her core, a survivor—a fact that is reinforced by her very name. In stark contrast to Prim and Rue, who were both named after pretty, delicate flowers, Katniss was named after a root—one that can be eaten like a potato, leading her father to have once commented that as long as Katniss could find herself, she’d never starve (ironic, given that Katniss spends much of the series trying to figure out who exactly she is). It’s a practical name: no frills, no fuss, all about the bottom line.

  Survival.

  Whether she’s “Katniss” or “the Mockingjay,” it’s all right there in the name: Katniss is the kind of person who does what she needs to do to survive. Her other dominant characteristic—the one other thing that’s important to her—should be obvious, given that she entered the Hunger Games voluntarily to save Prim.

  Family.

  To this end, I’d argue that there might be a better symbol for Katniss than the mockingjay or the potato-like plant after which she was named, one that shows up like clockwork in every book of the trilogy, tracing Katniss’ path as she goes.

  Buttercup.

  I know that it might seem crazy to some people that I think you can get a better sense Katniss’ character by looking at The Cat Who Refuses To Die than by debating the relative merits of Peeta versus Gale, but at the end of the day, if I had to pick a “team” (other than Team Katniss, of course), I would pick Team Buttercup. Not because I don’t love Peeta (I do) or Gale (also do), but because I can’t help looking at that beat-up old cat, who arrived at the Everdeen household as a scrawny little kitten, and thinking about how very much like Katniss he is. Standoffish. Protective. A creature who, against all odds, survives.

  Gale may be the one who promises to protect Prim when Katniss leaves for the Games, but Buttercup is the one she trusts to watch over her little sister—to comfort her when she cries, to love her. Other than the fact that Buttercup’s a great hunter and has a less-than-approachable personality, his two most defining characteristics are that he survives things a cat has no business surviving and that he loves Prim.

  Sound familiar?

  Throughout the trilogy, these same two characteristics are the ones that drive Katniss’ actions the most. She is focused, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, on finding a way to survive and protecting the people she considers family so that they may do the same. The importance Katniss puts on survival and family seems obvious, not just to us as readers, but to the handful of people who actually know Katniss. Peeta and Gale agree that Katniss will ultimately choose whoever she can’t survive without, and even President Snow hits the nail on the head, saying, “Any girl who goes to such lengths to preserve her life isn’t going to be interested in throwing it away” (Catching Fire). Significantly, however, President Snow doesn’t end his appraisal of Katniss with that statement about her will to survive; in a threatening tone, he adds on, “And then there’s her family to think of,” pinpointing her second major priority as well. Katniss is a survivor, and she lives to protect those she loves. Snow knows exactly how to threaten her, because—like the rest of the major players in the series—he knows exactly what our heroine’s priorities are.

  But what is significantly less obvious—and what I think accounts for many of the character developments we see in Mockingjay (and the fact that Katniss fails to go suddenly Buffy and start kicking ass left and right)—is the fact that together, these two driving forces—the ability to survive and an intense love for people who might not—can only lead one place when you put Katniss in any kind of war. Suffice to say, it’s not a happy place, and to really understand it—and the girl—you have to take a step back and think about how Katniss views family and what it means to her to survive.

  Survivor

  For Katniss, the name of the game has always been survival. At the age of eleven, with her father dead and her mother falling to pieces, Katniss had to make a choice, and she chose to set aside her own grief and fight for her family and for herself. To Katniss, whose mother “went away” and became an emotional invalid after her father’s death, this must have seemed like an either/or situation: you can either grieve for your lost loved ones or you can plow on; you can love and risk being decimated, or you can survive.

  It’s little wonder, then, that in Katniss’ mind romance was something she “never had the time or use for” (Hunger Games) and that when circumstances forced her to start thinking of love, it was always, always tied in her mind to survival. When Gale asks Katniss to go away with him at the beginning of the first book, she turns him down and only later begins to wonder whether the invitation was a practical means of increasing their chances of survival or whether it was something more. Shortly thereafter, when comparing her feelings about Peeta to her feelings about Gale, Katniss explicitly ties romance and survival together, saying, “Gale and I were thrown together by a mutual need to survive. Peeta and I know the other’s survival means our death. How do you sidestep that?”

  Romance and survival, survival and romance.

  For Katniss, they have always gone hand in hand. And yet, when she overhears Gale telling Peeta that her romantic choice will
ultimately come down to who she can’t survive without, Katniss is completely thrown and hurt that Gale sees her as being so cold and passionless. She wonders if Gale is right, and if that makes her selfish or less of a person—but what Katniss not-so-shockingly doesn’t seem to realize about herself is that she absolutely, one hundred percent isn’t the kind of person who prizes her survival above all else.

  There is at least one thing that matters to her more.

  Katniss comments in Catching Fire that if she had been older when her father died, she might well have ended up prostituting herself to the Peacekeepers to keep Prim fed. During the Quarter Quell, she goes in with the full intention of dying, so that Peeta might live. Neither of those actions is the work of a girl with a cold heart and a Machiavellian approach to survival. Katniss throws herself in front of bullets as often as she dodges them—because she would rather die for the people she loves than see them hurt.

  Daughter, Sister, Mother, Friend

  If anyone doubts that Katniss is more driven by family than anything else—including romance—all you have to do is look at the role that Prim plays in almost every major turning point in the series. For a character who exists primarily off-screen, she’s instrumental in nearly everything Katniss does. She’s the impetus for Katniss volunteering for the Games. In Catching Fire, she’s the reason Katniss considers taking to the woods and the reason she decides not to—if her job is to protect Prim, she’s already failed, because the Capitol has been hurting her little sister since the day she was born. In Mockingjay, Prim is the first one who spells out for Katniss exactly how much power she has as the Mockingjay, and Prim’s death kicks off the final act of the book, cutting off one vertex of the Katniss/ Peeta/Gale love triangle as viciously as a bomb can blow off a leg. Prim is the first character, other than Katniss, to appear in the books, and Katniss’ very first action on the very first page is to reach for her and come up empty-handed.

  If that’s not foreshadowing, I don’t know what is.

  But although Katniss identifies Prim as “the only person in the world I’m certain I love” (Hunger Games), throughout the course of the series, we see Katniss taking other people into her heart.

  Adopting them.

  Making them family.

  The most of obvious case of this is Rue. Katniss takes her in, casts her in Prim’s role, tries to protect her and fails. Rue’s death, more even than the promise Katniss made to Prim, is what drives our heroine to devote herself to winning the Games—because the only way to make Rue’s death mean something, to make her unforgettable, is “by winning and thereby making [herself] unforgettable.” In the span of less than twenty-four hours, Katniss lets Rue past all of her shields. She trusts her. She makes her family.

  And then Rue dies.

  While the little girl from District 11 is the only one, other than Prim, who gets the word “love” out of Katniss in that first book, even if it is in the lyrics of a song, this isn’t a pattern that holds up for long. Throughout the series, we see Katniss bringing more and more people into her fold: Peeta and Haymitch, Mags, Johanna and Finnick, Cinna. As focused as Katniss is on her own family, and as much as she tries to “protect” herself from letting other people in, the number of people the Capitol can use to hurt her just keeps growing and growing. The number of people Katniss feels she must protect keeps getting bigger and bigger.

  And the number of times she will inevitably fail becomes innumerable.

  The End

  Katniss is a survivor, and she’s a protector. She’s a person who creates family everywhere she goes and a person who loves fiercely—but she lives in a brutal world, a world in which she cannot protect the ones she loves, a world in which survival—and living without her loved ones—is more of a curse than it is a blessing.

  I would like to argue that this—and not any kind of romantic decision—is what makes Katniss Everdeen the person we see at the series’ end. Her drive and ability to survive and her fierce love of the family she’s made are the traits that account for every single moment named in Mockingjay when Haymitch asks people to talk about times when they were personally affected by Katniss’ actions. Ultimately, even to the other characters in the book, Katniss isn’t The Girl Who Chose Peeta. She’s not The Mockingjay or The Girl on Fire or The Girl Who Didn’t Choose Gale.

  She’s a girl who survives something horrible and loses far too many people along the way.

  There’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I’ve been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live—ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I’m writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn’t get the heroic death. She survives—and that leaves her doing the hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones that she loves are gone.

  The very last we see of Katniss in Mockingjay is an epilogue in which she’s still struggling with that, even as we learn that she’s come full circle and given birth to a new family. Some people probably read that epilogue and think, “Okay, so Katniss chose Peeta and they had kids. The End.” I read it and think that Katniss chose to go on—again. She chose to love—again. She’s scarred, but she survived—and she loves her children just as fiercely as she loved Prim.

  That’s who Katniss is, underneath all of the masks—and if we’re picking teams, I’m on hers.

  JENNIFER LYNN BARNES is the author of seven books for young adults, including Tattoo, Fate, the Squad series, and Raised by Wolves, a paranormal adventure about a human girl raised by werewolves. Jen graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a degree in cognitive science and Cambridge University in 2007 with a master’s in psychiatry. She’s currently hard at work on a PhD.

  YOUR HEART IS A WEAPON THE SIZE OF YOUR FIST

  Love as a Political Act in the Hunger Games

  MARY BORSELLINO

  We see some really memorable weapons in the Hunger Games series. The wolf mutts with the eyes of the dead tributes in The Hunger Games stand out, as does Katniss’ bow. There are Gale’s snares, as effective at trapping people as animals, and of course the multitude of horrors contained in the Capitol’s pods in Mockingjay. For Mary Borsellino, though, none of these even come close to the most powerful weapon in the series: love.

  There’s a piece of graffiti on a wall in Palestine. Over the years since it was painted, it’s been photographed by scores of travelers and journalists. It reads:

  Your heart is a weapon the size of your fist. Keep fighting. Keep loving.

  More than bombs, fire, guns or arrows, love is the most powerful weapon in the Hunger Games. It stirs and feeds the rebellion. It saves the doomed. It destroys the bereaved. And it gives even the most devastated survivors a reason to go on.

  “Love” is not synonymous with “passion”. Hatred is also a passionate emotion. When I say “love” here, I mean compassion, loyalty, empathy, and the bonds of friendship, family, and romance. All these things are present in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series. So too are greed, selfishness, hatred, and fear. That the protagonists are able to put stock in love, even while given so many reasons to hate, is what gives the Hunger Games a note of hope despite the suffering of the characters.

  The Hunger Games is part of a genre of post-apocalyptic political fiction, the best known example of which is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Suzanne Collins has said that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book she reads over and over again,1 and the Hunger Games shows a great debt to Orwell’s novel and to subsequent variations on it such as the graphic novel V for Vendetta.

  Both the Hunger Games and Nineteen Eighty-Four pit the power of hate versus the power of love. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s hate that ultimately triumphs, but the Hunger Games—which is American, as opposed to British, and so perhaps comes from a more culturally optimist
ic place when it comes to rebellions—ultimately insists that love is strong enough to survive through the horrors placed before it.

  The Hunger Games’ Katniss was a hard, calculating, distrustful person even before her time in the arenas and the war, and yet her largest decisions are always motivated by love. She volunteers for the Games in order to save Prim’s life, something that is almost never done because the Capitol teaches people to put their own self-preservation before any bond of love in such a situation, even a bond as close as that between Katniss and Prim. Katniss defies this.

  Suzanne Collins has explained that Katniss is “a girl who should never have existed,” an unexpected outcome of a security glitch in the Capitol’s regime, just like the mockingjays. She is “this girl who slips under this fence ... and along with that goes a degree of independent thinking that is unusual in the districts.”2

  Neither of the cages the Capitol has in place—the fence, prioritizing self-preservation over love for family or friends—hold her, and by breaking out, she makes other people realize that they can too. On live television, all over Panem, she introduces a radical new idea: that it is important to care about other people; that it is the most important thing in the world.

  While we’re talking about television, it’s important to touch on one of the strangest ways in which the Hunger Games owes a debt to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four includes the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” which in that novel means that the state—personified by its leader, Big Brother—can see everything you do. You are never safe from its surveillance, and all treason will be found out.