The Girl Who Was on Fire (6 page)

So what can we take from the stories of Winston and Julia, of Valerie, of Katniss and Peeta? Why does George Orwell end his
love story with the lovers broken and defeated? Why does writer Alan Moore kill off the defiant Valerie? And, with these grim precedents in place, why does Suzanne Collins then decide to give Katniss and Peeta a fragile, scarred, but undeniably happy ending?

The answer may come from the connection Peeta and Katniss share to the land of District 12. The first time Katniss sees Peeta again, he is gardening, and it is the fearlessness Katniss feels in the wild that allowed her to survive her first trip to the Arena. Katniss and Peeta are both linked to the natural world, and in the natural world even the worst of winters is followed by a spring.

The epilogue of
Mockingjay
shows Katniss watching her children play in the Meadow, now green and lush once again. New life grows, even in graveyards. Rue’s funeral song is able to become a child’s simple tune once more. There are losses to mourn, but also children to love: Prim and her mother have both left Katniss forever, a discarded knitting basket remaining as a reminder, but Greasy Sae’s granddaughter is there to take the wool instead.

Katniss and Peeta are both terribly scarred, physically and psychologically, by their experiences in the arenas and the war. But they are able to go on, and survive the pain. Katniss describes the way she copes with her moments of terror and pain: “I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do.”

Katniss Everdeen can survive her darkness because she understands the same truth that’s expressed in that graffiti in Palestine. Her heart is a weapon, and the way to keep fighting against all the horror and cruelty of the world is to wield that weapon. To keep loving.

MARY BORSELLINO
is a writer who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her latest books are the acclaimed Wolf House series. Her website is
http://www.maryborsellino.com
and her email is [email protected]. She likes punk rock, cups of tea, and clever people. She cried really hard at the end of
Mockingjay
.

 

 

Imagine living in a world where you can’t trust anyone—not your neighbors, not your friends—and you’re never alone or safe—not in the woods, not in your home, not at your job. Or just think about what it would be like to grow up in Panem. In such a world, the only way to survive is by learning to see through the deceptions that surround you and figure out how to use them to your own advantage. Here, Elizabeth M. Rees takes us through the layers of smoke and mirrors in the Hunger Games series and the challenges Katniss faces in her pursuit of truth.

—Encarta World English Dictionary

—Collins English Dictionary

 

 

W
hen I was a kid my favorite game was “Let’s Pretend.” Every child plays one version or another. You create a world for a day, or an afternoon, complete with rules, with adventures, with tragedies and silly happenings, everything from tea parties to out-and-out galactic warfare. But then your mom calls you in for dinner, or to do chores or homework, and game time ends. Poof! The pretend world evaporates into thin air, never to exist in exactly the same way again.

But what if it never vanished? What if all that pretense, that make-believe, wasn’t imaginary at all? What if your whole world, day-in and day-out, was made up of pretense, lies, and deceit? What if your life or your death depended on rules that change on a whim? What if to survive at all, you too have to learn to play a game of smoke and mirrors—to master a game constructed of lies, one that you can never control?

Katniss Everdeen, in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, is forced to do just that. Even as Katniss is engulfed in ever more vicious treachery, sinister tricks, and heartbreaking betrayals,
her hero’s task is to penetrate the smoke and mirrors that delude herself and others until she can at last distinguish the real from the unreal, both in her own life and in Panem.

At the beginning of the first book we are introduced to the convolutions of survival in Panem through Katniss’ daily struggles in District 12. The government masquerades as some kind of democracy: it does sport a president, albeit one with dictatorial powers.
³
In Big Brother style, the Capitol suppresses any kind of dissent, behind the guise, of course, of “protecting” its citizens. Services that could ease the difficult lives of the residents are meted out according to each district’s usefulness to the Capitol (electricity is sporadic, at least in the least-favored districts). Within each district resources are never fairly distributed in the markets frequented by the general public. Fuel and food are doled out in amounts that barely sustain the populace. Only the elite of each district, and mainly of the Capitol, benefit from the grueling labor of Panem’s citizens.

The government’s heavy hand hovers over the districts as it metes out draconian punishment for the smallest of offenses: illegal hunting merits a public whipping and/or time in the stocks, and even casual comments against the government lead to death—or to life—as an Avox, rendered mute and forced to
live a life of slavery serving the wealthy denizens of the Capitol. To police its citizens the Capitol eavesdrops: during the first rebellion, it used muttations like the jabberjays, which could mimic human speech, to parrot back to the authorities everything they heard. Since then the government has employed alternate means mysterious to Katniss, but which we later learn include phone tapping.
⁴
To insure that no one forgets the price of an uprising all of Panem is held in thrall by the Games and the terrible ritual of the reaping, where the child-tributes are ripped from their homes and families in order to kill each other.

Survival in such circumstances is difficult at best, but after Katniss’ father dies in a mining accident, survival for her and her family means constant negotiation of a maze of lies, pretense, and deception. The alternative: death by starvation, or an even worse fate than death. Rendered totally dysfunctional by grief, their mother couldn’t care for her children’s most basic needs, but if they look too disheveled, or grow weak and sick, Prim and Katniss would be taken by Peacekeepers to the Seam’s community home—an institution masquerading as a refuge. Community home kids arrive at Katniss’ school black and blue and battered.
⁵
Katniss refuses to let Prim suffer this fate. But she has no “legal” recourse to stop the downward spiral of their existence. All she has are the forbidden hunting skills her father taught her. Though only eleven at the time, she braves the predatorfilled wilderness beyond the fenced-in borders and retrieves
her bow and arrow to provide her first meager meal for her family.

The electrified perimeter fence Katniss breaches to reach the forest serves a dual purpose: it keeps dangerous predators out, but it also keeps residents in. Katniss, like most residents of the Seam, knows the fence is a sham. Current hasn’t run through it for years. Yet everyone pretends the fence is operational. That touching it will kill you. It’s also in need of mending, which is what allows Katniss to crawl underneath.

The defunct fence is one reason Katniss and Gale can ignore laws with impunity while feeding their families and bartering their daily catch for needed goods in the Hob, the District’s informal trading and black market hub. The other reason is the district’s powers-that-be, who with a wink and a nod condone not only the black market machine itself but also Katniss and Gale’s contribution to keeping it well-oiled and functioning. The Mayor is Katniss’ best customer for strawberries harvested beyond the fence. Even the Capitol’s Peacekeepers enjoy the illegal fare.

Both the thriving black market and the dysfunctional perimeter fence benefit everyone who lives in the Seam—rich or poor. The black market allows those who are better off access to delicacies available only to the Capitol’s residents and lets enterprising poor like Katniss survive. To acknowledge the fence is broken or that illicit trading is going on is to invite a crackdown from the Capitol, and District 12 is used to being left alone.

District 12 is so impoverished that until Katniss’ and Peeta’s return as victors, the Capitol has little interest in the local law enforcement. The residents are too weak and underfed to create much trouble—as long as the Seam continues to produce enough coal to fuel Panem’s energy needs, the Capitol is content to ignore it.

Of course, taking advantage of that neglect still requires Katniss to play her own game of Let’s Pretend—to constantly conjure up her own version of smoke and mirrors. She must go to the Mayor’s backdoor to sell her strawberries because she can’t afford “to be seen” doing so, even though the Mayor himself is her customer. She trades the meat she gets with Peacekeepers, but she must stow her bow and arrow in a hollow log inside the forest, much as her father did. Being caught with weapons is a capital offense in Panem. So Katniss adheres to the letter of the law, careful never to be seen with a weapon, even though her customers know she must use one to hunt.

Katniss has also mastered the art of masquerade, at least in terms of her feelings. To keep her family alive and safe, Katniss continually masks her resentment toward the unjust system that keeps everyone hungry, weak, and dependent on the corrupt Capitol. Keenly aware of the long arm of the Capitol, never knowing who is listening to what she, or Prim, or Gale might say in an unguarded moment, Katniss harbors a deep anger and resentment toward the Capitol. The very existence of the reaping further fuels the fire in her belly. But it is a fire she has learned to keep hidden. To express any disapproval of government policies is a death sentence. Whether she hunts or not, whether she is angry or not, doesn’t matter. What is important is how her actions appear.

By the day of the reaping, Katniss has become a grade-A student of deceit. On her home turf she has first hand experience of the Capitol’s sleight of hand: the electrified fence with no current, the Peacekeepers who pretend not to know she owns weapons, the horrors inside the supposed refuge of the Community Home. Nothing is ever what it seems. And not only has she learned to see through the Capitol’s trickery and find which rules can be bent, even broken without repercussions, she has mastered the skills to take advantage of that vision. Her life in
District 12 has been a kind of boot camp, or prep school, training her not just with the physical skills of a hunter, but also teaching her to be able to mask her feelings, to live inside a necessary lie—just to survive.

So in many ways Katniss is well prepared for the Games. The skills that allow her to hunt successfully for food can be easily if not comfortably applied to killing her fellow tributes. And she intuits immediately that a tribute who—even at the reapings—seems weak and fearful, like a frightened rabbit or deer, will go down fast in the arena. No sponsors will ever come to a weakling’s rescue. Thus, standing in front of the crowds at the reaping, she both knows to and is able to feign boredom, her face betraying none of the emotions roiling inside her.

But even as she first boards the train that will take her to the Capitol Katniss is brutally aware that she has to ramp up her survival tactics—fast! No one can be trusted—not even the boy whose one kind gesture when they were children stirred the embers of her flickering instinct to survive. She is determined never to drop her guard; she must remain as wary as she did while hunting—wary now just not of animal predators but of everything and every person she encounters before and during the Games.

Even before Katniss reaches the Capitol, we realize there are ways in which she is not at all prepared for the Games. District 12 has been her training ground, yes, but nothing in Katniss’ previous experience can prepare her for the calculated, psychologically brutal nature of the Gamemakers’ tricks and traps or the kinds of deceptions necessary to survive
during the Games, and after them. Ironically it’s in the arenas of the Games themselves—as well as on
Mockingjay
’s urban battleground—that the dark art of smoke and mirrors reach a savage perfection.

Katniss is good at figuring out rules and how to get around them, and these skills help her discern the complex patterns the Gamemakers wove into the Games. Certain sections of the arena, she realizes, present specific threats. This is even more apparent in
Catching Fire
, where the arena’s horrors are timed to be released at specific hours in specific predictable quadrants—jabberjays, acid fog, killer monkeys. Katniss also understands the Gamemakers’ need to keep the TV audience entertained. A day with no kills, no action, might bore the audience and so always leads to a ramping up of challenges in the arena.