The Girl Who Was on Fire (3 page)

Even though the audience knows Katniss, Peeta, and the Hunger Games are all not real, we still believe that answer is true.

 

 

 

 

Who doesn’t love a good love triangle—especially one involving guys like Peeta and Gale? Finding out which boy Katniss would end up with was an important moment—and for some readers the most important moment—in the series. But, as Jennifer Lynn Barnes reminds us, amid all the talk of who Katniss would
choose
, we sometimes forgot to think about who Katniss actually
is
. Barnes looks at Katniss independent of potential love interests and provides a convincing alternative to Team Peeta and Team Gale: Team Katniss.

 

 

T
hese days, it seems like you can’t throw a fish in a bookstore without hitting a high-stakes love triangle—not that I recommend the throwing of fish in bookstores, mind you (it annoys the booksellers—not to mention the fish), but it certainly seems like more and more YA heroines are being faced with a problem of abundance when it comes to the opposite sex. While I am a total sucker for romance (not to mention quite fond of a variety of fictional boys myself), I still can’t help but wonder if, as readers, we’re becoming so used to romantic conflict taking center stage that we focus in on that aspect of fiction even when there are much larger issues at play.

No book has ever made me ponder this question as much as Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy—in part because it seems like everyone I know has very strong feelings about which boy is the best fit for Katniss, but also because the books themselves contain a commentary on the way audiences latch onto romance, even (and maybe especially) when lives are at stake. To survive her first Hunger Games, Katniss has to give the privileged viewers in the Capitol exactly what they want—a high-stakes romance featuring star-crossed lovers and unthinkable choices. Given that readers of the Hunger Games trilogy are granted insider access to Katniss’ mind, life, and obligations, it seems somewhat ironic that in the days leading up to the release of
Mockingjay
, the series was often viewed the same way—with readers on “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” focusing on Katniss’ love life, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else.

But Katniss Everdeen—like a variety of her literary predecessors—is far more than a vertex on some love triangle. She is
interesting and flawed and completely three-dimensional all on her own. She’s a sister, a daughter, a friend, a hero, and—above all—a
survivor
. She’s defined by her compassion, her loyalty, and her perseverance, and those are all traits she has independent of the boys.

I’m not Team Gale or Team Peeta. I’m Team Katniss, and in the next few pages, we’re going to take a closer look at her character and explore the idea that the core story in the Hunger Games trilogy has less to do with who Katniss ends up with and more to do with who she
is
—because sometimes, in books and in life, it’s not about the romance.

Sometimes, it’s about the girl.

Ask anyone who’s ever met her—Katniss Everdeen is a hard person to know. She has one of the most recognizable faces in her entire world, but the vast majority of Panem knows very little about the
real
Katniss. To the viewers of the Games, she’s the object of Peeta’s affection and then a star-crossed lover herself. Later, she’s the Mockingjay, the face of the rebellion, and ultimately, as far as the outside world is concerned, a broken shell of a girl pushed to the edge of insanity and beyond. Sometimes Katniss dons these masks willingly; sometimes they are thrust upon her. But one thing is certain—unlike the Careers, the flighty members of her prep team, or many of the Capitol’s citizens, Katniss has no desire to be famous.

She has no desire to be known.

Whether it’s with the viewers of the Games, the revolutionaries, or the townspeople in District 12, Katniss is the type to
keep her distance, a fact she readily admits to in the first chapter of book one, saying that over time, she has learned to “hold [her] tongue and to turn [her] features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read [her] thoughts.” Katniss keeps her private thoughts private and keeps most of the world at least an arm’s length away. Next to Gale, Katniss’ closest friend before the reaping is a girl she barely speaks to. In fact, when describing her friendship with Madge, Katniss suggests that the two of them get along primarily because they both just keep to themselves.

Clearly, this pre-reaping Katniss identifies as a loner, never getting too close to other people, never expecting too much of them so that she is never disappointed. Similarly, the people in District 12 seem content to let Katniss keep them at bay. Other than her family, Gale, and in his own adore-her-from-afar way, Peeta, there don’t appear to be people lining up to know Katniss Everdeen. Even the family cat keeps his distance when she feeds him—to the point that Katniss remarks that “entrails” and “no hissing” are the closest she and Buttercup can come to love. The same could be said of Katniss’ relationship with everyone from the baker to the Peacemakers who buy her contraband prey—right up until the moment she takes Prim’s place at the reaping.

Standing up on the stage after she takes Prim’s place, Katniss notes that it is as if a switch has been flipped, and all of a sudden, she has “become someone precious” to people who have never seemed to care about her one way or another, people who don’t really know her, except through that one selfless act. As she realizes this, Katniss—in typical Katniss fashion—schools her face to be devoid of emotion, refusing to let the rest of the world see her tears, and this reluctance to give the Games’ viewers anything real continues throughout the series. Our heroine’s initial reaction to Haymitch telling her to make the audience feel like
they know her is to explode, arguing that the Capitol has already taken away her future and that she doesn’t owe them anything else. When Katniss does eventually give viewers a tiny glimpse of her love for Prim during her first pre-Games interview with Caesar Flickerman, even this revelation lays our heroine as bare as if she’d been asked to undress on camera.

Throughout the series, Katniss wears many masks—and a large part of the reason she slips into them so easily is that being the Mockingjay, or the giggling girl twirling around in her dress, or the lunatic who killed President Coin, is easier than letting people in and being herself. It’s occurred to me—more than once—that maybe Katniss isn’t just a hard person to know; maybe she’s a hard
character
to know, too, even for those of us who are inside her head. Maybe that’s why there’s a tendency for readers to fall into the same trap as the viewers in the Capitol and to look for an easy answer, a handy label like “girl in love” or some kind of either/or question that will tell us exactly who Katniss Everdeen is.

Maybe, for a lot of readers, that question is
Peeta or Gale?

I think there are two reasons that Katniss is a hard character for us, as readers, to wrap our minds around. The first is that Katniss isn’t the kind of hero we’re used to seeing in fiction. She reacts more than she acts, she doesn’t want to be a leader, and by the end of
Mockingjay
, she hasn’t come into her own or risen like a phoenix from the ashes for some triumphant moment that gives us a sense of satisfaction with how far our protagonist has come. She’s not a Buffy. She’s not a Bella. She limps across the finish line when we’re used to seeing heroes
racing; she eases into a quiet, steady love instead of falling fast and hard.

As much as Katniss holds herself apart from the people in her own world, she doesn’t fit easily in with the canon of literary heroines either. But in addition to not fitting the mold, Katniss can be even more difficult for readers to know because though the books are told in first person, Katniss has strikingly little self-awareness. We have to work to figure Katniss out, because as often as not,
Katniss
doesn’t know who she is, what she feels, or the kind of influence she wields over other people.

Peeta points this cluelessness out to Haymitch after Katniss’ first interview in
The Hunger Games
, but even hearing him say that she has no idea what kind of effect she has on people, Katniss seems fully oblivious to what Peeta is talking about. She spends most of the trilogy completely unsure of her own romantic feelings, but she’s equally in the dark about everything from the kind of person she is and the kind of person she wants to be to the influence she wields as the Mockingjay. Consider a moment shortly after the reaping when Katniss is told that people admire her spirit. She seems perplexed, saying “I’m not exactly sure what it means, but it suggests I’m a fighter. In a sort of brave way.” The idea that a girl who volunteers for certain death to save a loved one might
not
know that she is brave is astounding, but somehow, Collins sells it absolutely.

Given that Katniss knows so little of herself, is it any wonder that she can be difficult for us to wrap our heads around, too? It seems plausible to me that one of the reasons that so many readers seem entirely invested in whether Katniss ends up with Peeta or Gale is that this seems like a more manageable question than debating the kind of person Katniss is at her core. After all, firecracker Gale and dandelion Peeta are so different from each
other that it’s easy to imagine that a girl who would choose Gale is a completely different person than one who would choose Peeta. When people sit around debating who Katniss should choose, maybe what they’re really debating actually
is
her identity—and the romance is just a proxy for that big, hard question about the ever-changing, unaware girl on fire.

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.

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.