The Girl Who Was on Fire (5 page)

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 optimistic 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.

These days, of course, “Big Brother” means something completely different, as it is the name of one of the first of the wildly popular shows in the reality television genre. In
Big Brother
, a group of people are thrown together in a closed environment and watched by audiences at home. Big Brother is watching them, and we are watching
Big Brother
.

President Snow, in controlling the districts via the Hunger Games, is both Big Brothers at once: the dictator and the reality television producer. The Hunger Games series very consciously plays with the fact that it follows not only Orwell’s novel, but also the entertainment revolution it inadvertantly spawned.

In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
there is another equivalent to President Snow, a character named O’Brien who, in describing how his government has achieved such total power over people, also neatly sums up the Capitol’s intentions:

This is what makes Katniss’ self-sacrifice for Prim such a powerful act. If the Capitol had really succeeded at severing those links, then it would have been Primrose Everdeen who went into the arena, not her older sister, wouldn’t it?

And there is a love story in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, just as there is one in the Hunger Games. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, it is between a man named Winston and a woman named Julia. Like Peeta in
Mockingjay
, Winston and Julia are punished for their
rebellion by being tortured in specific ways that make them hate the person they were once in love with. Like Katniss, their wills are finally broken when they are presented with what, to them, is the worst thing in the world. (The worst thing for Katniss was losing Prim, but for Winston it is much more banal: he has a phobia of rats, and is threatened with being eaten by them. Julia’s worst fear is never revealed to the reader.)

When the two love stories are compared, you can see much of Winston and Julia in the way Suzanne Collins has written Peeta and Katniss’ story, and in just how important and powerful the romance Peeta and Katniss put on for the cameras through the first two novels of the trilogy is in stoking the flames of the rebellion.

In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Winston and Julia’s love story starts when Julia slips Winston a piece of paper as they bump into one another one day.

If that sounds like a bait-and-switch—he expected something political, but really she’s in love with him!—think again. Love when there isn’t supposed to be love is a hugely subversive political act. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be protest marches in countries all over the world demanding same-sex marriage. It was illegal until 1967 for black and white people to marry one another in some parts of the USA. A 2007 survey found that more than half of the Jewish people in Israel believed intermarriage between Jewish females and Arab males was equivalent to national treason.

When the love you feel is against the laws of those in control, then love is a political act. It’s true in the real world, true in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and true in the Hunger Games.

When Katniss and Peeta make as if to kill themselves rather than one another at the end of the first Games, it is seen by President Snow as dangerous because it could be interpreted as an act of rebellion. In
Catching Fire
, he demands that Katniss convince the districts that she acted out of love for Peeta, not out of defiance against the Capitol. As far as Snow can see, her actions are either/or—either Katniss looks like a rebel or she looks like a girl in love; her motivation can only be one or the other.

What President Snow never understands is that choosing love over survival is the ultimate act of defiance Katniss can make. It’s not one or the other; the love and rebellion are one in the same.

The Capitol teaches almost everyone to see the tributes as less than human: when Katniss is first being styled by her prep team, they wax and scrub her and then declare happily that she looks almost like a person. Before that, when Katniss says good-bye to Gale, he tells her that killing the other tributes won’t be any different to killing animals in the woods. When President Snow’s scientists hijack Peeta and make him think that Katniss is a mutt it is only another example of the Capitol’s commitment to dehumanization.

But Katniss doesn’t accept that. She sees the value in human life, even as she is forced into becoming a killer and soldier. She teams up with Rue in the arena, rather than simply killing the little girl and taking out some of her competition. When Rue dies, Katniss sings to her, and covers her with flowers.

The effect of this tiny, humanizing act—singing to a dying child—has immediate and far reaching consequences. Rue’s
district sends Katniss bread. Rue’s fellow tribute spares her life when they face off later in the Games. In
Catching Fire
, it’s Rue’s song that the district whistles to Katniss to show their support for her, and in
Mockingjay
Boggs offers Katniss’ singing as a moment when he was touched by her.

Do you begin to see what President Snow couldn’t?

Love, like fire, is catching.

Katniss, going along with Snow’s plan to make the romance with Peeta seem to be the cause of her actions, can’t see it either. But with every interview and appearance, she declares herself loyal to something other than the Capitol. And love has already proved to be more powerful than the Capitol, because both of District 12’s tributes have survived the Games.

Another post-apocalyptic political story of recent years was the graphic novel, and subsequent film,
V for Vendetta
. It, like the Hunger Games, is the story of the figurehead of a rebellion, and of a teenage girl, Evie. It, too, shows clear echoes of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
in its storytelling.

When Evie is captured by the police and taken to jail, she finds a letter hidden in her cell. It was from an earlier prisoner, Valerie, and tells the story of Valerie’s life. Valerie was gay, rounded up and put to death in a concentration camp. In the letter left behind, she wrote:

Valerie died because of who she loved, but her love is stronger than the hate that executed her. It survives her death, waiting patiently in the cell until Evie comes and finds it later.

Julia and Winston’s love doesn’t survive the things that they are put through when they are captured—the tortures hijack that last inch of them. When they see each other again, as broken and hijacked as Peeta becomes in
Mockingjay
, Winston thinks of an old song lyric:

The last time Katniss sees Peeta in the war, before trying to infiltrate Snow’s mansion and instead witnessing the violent and horrific death of her sister, she imagines Gale being taken by Peacekeepers and Peeta being forced to take the nightlock poison. She then thinks of “The Hanging Tree” song:

Combined, the two songs become a question posed to Peeta and Katniss: will fear, torture, hate, lust for power, and the desire for self-preservation ultimately prove to be so strong that even lovers would betray each other? Are they coming to the chestnut tree, where they will sell each other out?

The Hunger Games, however, declare that no, love
does
conquer hate, even in circumstances as dire as Katniss and Peeta’s. Their love survives what Winston and Julia’s cannot.

Katniss and Peeta both have moments of suicidal despair in
Mockingjay
. Peeta is tortured until he can’t even remember what his favorite color is, much less whether or not he loves Katniss.
Katniss loses Prim, the sister she loves more than her own life. They are broken as absolutely as Julia and Winston are broken.

But Katniss is driven by love and compassion, even when the thing she loves most in the world is dead. When President Coin asks the surviving tributes whether another Hunger Games should be held, Katniss understands that Coin is no different, in the end, than Snow. In order to ensure herself an opportunity to assassinate Coin, Katniss gives a vote of yes to the new round of Games, and says that she does so “for Prim.”

The explanation seems, on the surface, to be one of vengeance: for Prim’s death, Katniss wants to see the children of the Capitol suffer in the same way. But in reality her motivation is self-sacrifice: Katniss began her journey when she put her own life in danger for Prim, for a child who would otherwise have died in the arena. Expecting to die after the assassination, Katniss once again places the life of children bound for the arena before her own by killing the woman who would have reinstated the Games. And Katniss does so out of love—she does it for Prim, even if Prim is already dead.

Katniss remains true, even in the face of crushing loss and the prospect of her own death, to an ideal that Winston has in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
but is ultimately unable to uphold himself: “the object was not to stay alive but to stay human.” Katniss retains that last inch of integrity and love that Valerie of
V for Vendetta
prized above life.

This is not to say that the power of love is always a triumphant force in the Hunger Games. Katniss’ mother is a skilled healer who can face terrible injury and illness without flinching, but losing her husband almost killed her and, because she was incapable of caring for them in her depressed state, almost killed her daughters as well. Prim’s death hits her so hard that she can not be there for Katniss in the aftermath.

Love is the greatest strength any of the characters have going for them, but is also their greatest weakness. President Snow was able to coerce Finnick into sexual slavery by threatening to hurt those that Finnick loved if he didn’t comply.

Yet the alternative—to have nobody you love—is infinitely worse than being made vulnerable by love. Johanna Mason explains in
Catching Fire
that there is nobody left whom she loves, and that this renders the jabberjays in the arena unable to hurt her through mimicking screams, though her meltdown during training in
Mockingjay
shows that even someone who loves nobody can still be wounded terribly by the Capitol.

When Peeta and Katniss are each wounded, just as deeply as Johanna, they have the other there to help them on the slow and rocky path to recovery. Johanna is no less damaged for her lack of love, but she doesn’t have anyone to help her back afterwards.

Like Johanna, neither Snow nor Coin indicate at any point in the Hunger Games that there is anyone or any thing that they themselves love. But both think that they understand what a powerful force love is, and both do their best to wield this power for their own evil ends.

In each case, however, their efforts backfire: by making Katniss emphasize her love story in
Catching Fire
, Snow does more to incite the rebellion against his Capitol than Katniss could have achieved on her own. And Coin, in attempting to reinstate the Hunger Games as a method of offering revenge to the districts, seals the death warrant on her regime and her self. The woman who views marriage as a reassignment of living quarters cannot anticipate the steadfast core of Katniss’ compassion. She nor Snow ever really understand love at all.