The Girl Who Was on Fire (2 page)

Anyone who speaks Latin (gets egged by the populace for being a nerd) must have wondered from the start if Panem was a reference to the Roman people’s reported liking for bread and circuses—for instant gratification that would distract them from the harsher realities of life. This is confirmed in
Mockingjay
, but Collins has said in a recent interview that she had it in mind from the start, and thus must have had in mind the questions: Why is it that that, for thousands of years, we humans have been allured by and interested in violent death? And what do you do when the underpinning of your whole society is based on this fascination? The answer is destroy the society and build a new one, which is an overwhelmingly daunting task, especially for a child who has to fight endlessly just for her own survival.

The premise of the Hunger Games provides us not only with a set-up for nonstop action, in which not only are the heroine’s life and the lives of the vast majority of the supporting characters in danger, but they and we possess a continuous awareness of both having and having to entertain an audience. Katniss is forced to go through with not one but two Hunger Games. In
The Hunger Games
, she is deeply aware of the audience because she knows playing on its sympathies by pretending love for Peeta will get the two the food and medicine they need to survive. In
Catching Fire
, the equation is even simpler—unless Katniss and Peeta give a convincing enough display of being madly in love, Snow will conclude that they are revolutionaries instead of lovers and have them executed. In each case, the weight of the populace’s expectations weighs heavily on Katniss, influencing both her actions and her feelings. It is a deadly loop, as both Katniss and the audience discover. We the readers are aware that Katniss’ audience is both enthralled by her pain and gullibly sucked in by her love story. Yet all the while we
know that
we
are Katniss’ real audience—and aren’t we enthralled by her pain and sucked in by her love story? How gullible does that make us?

The message of the Hunger Games is that appearances are both deceiving and vitally important. It is Cinna, Katniss’ stylist, who ties together Katniss and Peeta in the audience’s eyes by making them hold hands: “Presenting ourselves not as adversaries but as friends has distinguished us as much as the fiery costumes” (
The Hunger Games
). Katniss first attracts attention with costumes cleverly designed by Cinna and his team, and the importance of appearance is underlined again when Cinna (who dies near the end of
Catching Fire
) administers a makeover
from beyond the grave
in
Mockingjay
. Here too is one thing that gives relief to the grim storyline of the Hunger Games. Katniss does not want to be dressed up, or enjoy dressing up; she has no interest in such things. But the readers who do can enjoy the lovingly described costumes and the idea of being made up to be someone more attractive, someone so compelling they could end up being the sole focus of an audience’s attention, while the rest of the readers simply sympathize with Katniss during another trial.

In a way, the romantic subplot of the books reminds me of the makeover scenes. The romance intensifies the life-or-death tension of the books, because we know that Katniss and Peeta being able to appear to be in love is even more important than Katniss being able to appear beautiful—these illusions will save their lives. But it also provides relief: just like there are readers who would like to be transformed, there are readers who would like to be loved in the way Katniss is. Peeta loves her even though they have barely spoken, even though they hardly know each other. She has won his love from afar by doing nothing but being herself, fiercely struggling for her own survival and that
of her family, and he loves her so much he is willing to lie, to kill, and to die for her. The reader never really doubts Peeta’s love for Katniss, even when Katniss believes it is total illusion, and that not only provides a ray of light in the dark situation of the Hunger Games but endears both characters to us. Then we are shocked in
Mockingjay
when the one thing we did believe was real, Peeta’s love, may be destroyed.

If many of us like the idea of being loved from afar without having to work for or even be aware of it, there is also Gale, Katniss’ childhood friend and hunting companion. None of us want to be reduced to hunting desperately to feed our families, but if we were, it wouldn’t hurt for one’s trusty companion to be a good-looking, much-sought-after, and rather devoted member of the opposite sex. That leaves Katniss in a bit of a bind, of course—even if she does manage to survive, it seems that there is going to be a painful choice to make.

The romance also further displays the complexities of reality versus illusion: Suzanne Collins does not go the easy route of condemning illusion in favor of reality. Peeta, the golden boy of the series, the main character whose morality is the strongest and who is always the spokesperson for decency, is actually an accomplished liar, in the first book able to convince both the Career tributes and Katniss that he is a merciless killer. He is also able to use his skills as a baker to camouflage himself when wounded in the Games. As he puts it: “I guess all those hours decorating cakes paid off” (
The Hunger Games
).

Katniss, at first profoundly uncomfortable with deceit, by the end of
Mockingjay
ends up fooling the reader into thinking that she has agreed to the unthinkable—setting up a new Hunger Games—and thus become what she has been fighting against all this time. When she shoots Coin rather than Snow, we realize that this agreement was her means of getting the
chance to execute Coin and end the idea for the new Hunger Games. We also realize that a very new Katniss Everdeen has evolved over the Hunger Games trilogy, one who has progressed from being able to fool nobody to one who can fool everybody, including us.

Gale may in fact be the most open and honest character in the books. “I never question Gale’s motives while I do nothing but doubt [Peeta’s],” says Katniss in
The Hunger Games
. Suzanne Collins pulls a neat trick with Gale: he advocates throughout the three books for retaliation against the injustice of their society. But we the reader, like Katniss, are not sure he entirely means what he says. Gale is on the sidelines and understandably frustrated while Katniss and Peeta spend all three books in the eye of the storm. “Back in the old days ... Gale said things like this and worse. But then they were just words. Here, put into practice, they become deeds that can never be reversed” (
Mockingjay
). Suzanne Collins tells us how Gale is, and yet we do not quite realize it until the third book, when he turns his words into actions and thereby loses Katniss forever—by being the person he told her he was all along.

The major issue between Katniss and Gale in
Mockingjay
is precisely that Gale really does mean what he says. The reality of Gale—that he is so capable of hate and violence, that he is ultimately unable to protect Katniss’ family—is the major problem between the two. Katniss’ illusions about Gale—her thinking that he does
not
mean what he says—helps Gale’s cause romantically. Likewise with the audience. Gale has very limited page time in the first two books, but he is a literary archetype. The tall, dark, and handsome, aloof and mysterious boy who really connects with you even though all the ladies want him is a very appealing type. The figure of the “baker,” blond, sweet Peeta, is much less intrinsically alluring than the figure of the “hunter.”
Gale’s surface makes him extremely popular with readers, but the whole point of the Hunger Games is all the things going on beneath the surface.

It is an interesting juxtaposition, because if the problem between Katniss and Gale is reality, the problem between Katniss and Peeta is always illusion. Peeta is deceived by Katniss’ feigned love in
The Hunger Games
, both are forced into play-acting in
Catching Fire
, and in
Mockingjay
Peeta’s mental torture has had such an effect on him that he can no longer tell the difference between reality and illusion, between Katniss who he loves and his most deadly enemy. The other characters have to supply answers to Peeta’s constant refrain of “Real or not real?” throughout
Mockingjay
. He cannot entirely trust their answers, and yet he has to because he cannot rely on his own perception. His position is horrifying, and yet it is just a magnified version of everyone’s position in the Hunger Games—of our own positions as consumers of entertainment that pretends to reflect reality. The refrain “Real or not real?” is a simply a vocalization of the ultimate question of the Hunger Games, and it is a question without any definite answer.

War ends up having the same layers of deceit as the Hunger Games does. Early in
Mockingjay
the characters all come to the conclusion that Katniss is only convincing as a spokesperson when she herself is convinced by the situation: when it is real to her. So the rebellion has to set evocative scenes for Katniss, just as Snow and the Capitol do in the previous two books. Propaganda in war is even more important than in entertainment, and so the war we have known must happen from the start of the Hunger Games—a war to change this unbearable society—is portrayed as manufactured killing, as just another Hunger Games, and not much more real.

We never really do get a face for the antagonist: the closest we
come is Snow, and not only does Katniss explicitly reject the chance to kill him, but his death is quite flippantly accomplished and dismissed by the narrative: “Opinions differ on whether he choked to death by laughing or was crushed by the crowd. No one really cares” (
Mockingjay
). There is no easy way to defeat the evil in the world of the Hunger Games. It is the evil inherent in all of us, and even at the end it is by no means certain that all the evil we have been shown will not spring up again. After all, as Plutarch tells Katniss, “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction” (
Mockingjay
).

Katniss has a gift for destruction of both herself and others, which she realizes in
Mockingjay
makes her very like Gale. And yet she makes the decision not to be like Gale—not to kill Snow but to take out Coin, to eliminate the threat of violence in the future, rather than take revenge for violence in the past.

She also realizes that what she needs is someone who helps her be her better self, rather than someone who reflects her worst self: the guy less like her is actually the guy who’s best for her. To a degree, Gale decides the issue for her: not that he doesn’t love her, but that his actions in the war mean she will never be able to disassociate him from her sister’s death. Fans of both boys can be happy, in that Gale is never actually rejected by Katniss. He recognizes her feelings, which have to do with Prim rather than Peeta, and bows out. Last we hear, he has a “fancy job” and Katniss speculates about his possible other romances. Gale seems to be doing just fine for himself, and indeed one has pictures of the rebellion reunions in which Gale shows up in a flashy sports car and says, “Katniss, baby, you could have got with all this.” We, like Katniss, may feel a certain amount of regret at how things turned out, but we also see how feeding the fire of hate plays out with Gale, so we sympathize with Katniss
both in her realization that she is similar to Gale and in how it informs her ultimate decision that Peeta is a better mate for her, which we see when their love is both verbally confirmed and physically consummated.

“Wait, what was that you just said?” I hear you cry. Don’t worry, dear reader, I am not the lucky recipient of the Secret Naughty Edition of the Hunger Games. But Katniss wakes screaming in Peeta’s arms, and then his lips are there to comfort her, and then “on the night I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach ... So after ... ” (
Mockingjay
). After what, Katniss? Don’t think we didn’t notice the adroit dropping of the word “hunger” either. After the Games of Amore end, after the conclusion of the Hunger for Loooove, after their ardent quest to catch fire in the flames of passion, after—I’m sure nobody wants to hear me make a sexy joke involving
Mockingjay
’s title. Perhaps Katniss only refers to a truly excellent make-out session. Perhaps I am a filthy-minded creature from the gutter (perhaps there is no perhaps about that one). Anyway, they eventually have two kids, so I rest assured in the knowledge it’s going to happen sometime.

Katniss and Peeta’s romance has a very definite conclusion. In fact, overall the Hunger Games has a very final ending, in the manner of Harry Potter, which wound up the seven-book series nineteen years later, with the hero and several other characters established as married with children. Katniss and Peeta have aged at least fifteen years and have children, and their society has been successfully readjusted, the Hunger Games seemingly permanently eliminated, though their psyches remain scarred by war. The book is definitively closed, perhaps to remove any possibility of being tempted to write sequels that might spoil the arc of the books. Many of the most beloved series have very final endings and give their readers a resounding sense of closure,
though this may be more cause than effect—because of their popularity, the author may feel he or she has to close the book on the series with no possibility of return. I feel C.S. Lewis still takes the cake with his ending for the Chronicles of Narnia, which is “the world ends, and everyone who isn’t currently in that world dies in a train crash anyway—oh, except for that one chick”—but well played on a decisive finish, Ms. Collins!

The Hunger Games trilogy has an unsettling premise that combines action adventure with a social conscience, the wishfulfillment of having two guys desperately in love with you, and a resoundingly conclusive ending. It also has a writer who selected her subject material carefully, and who by choosing a subject that fascinated her chose a subject that resonated with a great many other people. We sympathize with the characters, able to doubt them just enough to add to the suspense, as we fear Peeta is betraying Katniss in
The Hunger Games
and Katniss is supporting a new Hunger Games in
Mockingjay
, and yet we are able to trust them in extremis. Katniss never considers killing the young girl Rue in
The Hunger Games
; the worst lines are never crossed by our hero and heroine, which allows us to continue to care for them despite their violent actions. Suzanne Collins even provides us, through the romantic subplot, with an answer for the overlap between reality and illusion. Katniss’ many deceptions do eventually accomplish good: the Hunger Games are over, and despite all Katniss’ losses society is at least improved. When Peeta asks Katniss at the end of
Mockingjay
, “You love me, real or not real?” and she answers, “Real,” we know this was not always true. Illusion can become reality. Love is real now.