Reading and re-reading: thoughts on MOCKINGJAY, CATCHING FIRE, and THE HUNGER GAMES

I know I’m a little late to the conversation, but after reading MOCKINGJAY last Friday, I needed some time to digest and reflect. I’m still not finished reading all of the MOCKINGJAY reviews and meditations on the blogs I follow, so apologies if I’m not linking to other relevant blog posts. And this will contain spoilers, so if you still haven’t read MOCKINGJAY (why haven’t you read MOCKINGJAY yet?!), mark this as unread or bookmark it for later.

Also this is super-long (sorry), but I think MOCKINGJAY–and the whole trilogy–really packs a lot in and I’ve had a whole week to think about everything. You’re lucky it’s not longer!

Hearing Suzanne Collins read
Last Friday I got to see Suzanne Collins read from Catching Fire and Mockingjay and get a custom-stamped book. I took pictures and was planning to include them in this post, but a cell phone mishap in the last week means they’re lost to the ether. But Jennifer of YABOOKNERD was there, too, so you can check out her post about the reading.

Anyway, hearing Collins read was especially interesting because she reads Katniss with a “futuristic Appalachian accent.” And you know, given that District 12 is what used to be Appalachia, that makes sense, but I hadn’t been reading Katniss’s voice that way, so hearing her with an accent subtly changed my perception of the character–and I like it. Fan opinion has been mixed and it’s interesting to see what connotations individual people assign to southern accents. For me, it emphasizes that Katniss is from somewhere remote and backward and makes her seem… not simple, but certainly not an intellectual. I like the extra dimension it gives her.

After reading the passage in Catching Fire where Katniss’s wedding dress burns away during her interview with Caesar Flickerman, revealing the black dress underneath and turning her into a mockingjay, Collins read the first chapter of Mockingjay and then started stamping books.

Totally worth the wait!

After thanking Collins and collecting a few more temporary mockingjay tattoos and the bag clip I’d won in a post-it-under-the-chair-style raffle, I made a trip to RJ Julia Booksellers, who’d sponsored the event. I was impressed with their selection of young adult and middle grade titles and bought more books than I probably should have! But I like the chance to support independent booksellers–especially ones who score such great author visits!

As soon as I got home, I dove straight in and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening and night reading. But before I talk about Mockingjay, I want to reflect a little on some thoughts I had while re-reading The Hunger Games and Catching Fire last week to get reading for Mockingjay.

The Hunger Games and Catching Fire
First off, I can’t believe how much of Catching Fire I’d forgotten! I’d started The Hunger Games one afternoon after class and stayed up super-late to finish it, but that didn’t compare with how I blazed through Catching Fire (hur hur) after receiving an ARC at ALA Annual 2009. I guess tearing through it that quickly really affected my retention. This time I read more slowly, thinking more about themes and watching common threads through the narrative.

The first time I read the first two books, I didn’t feel particularly interested in the Peeta-Katniss-Gale love triangle. I was much more interested in Katniss’s survival, in the upcoming overthrown of the Capitol, and in learning more about District 13. And I was also a little irritated that everyone I talked to seemed to think that Katniss had to choose one of them, because in the book she talks about how she never wants to get married and have children because she’d have to watch them go through the Reaping. Why couldn’t Katniss just choose herself and not be defined by the boy she picked? I think that Malinda Lo does a great job of making this point. When I was pressed, I would claim allegiance to Team Gale, because I wanted Katniss to be able to move on and have a life after the arena, and Gale represented the unspoiled part of her life to me. Gale also stood for the revolution, which I was excited about because revolution–successful or thwarted–is always the exciting part of dystopian lit.

But after rereading THG and CF one right after the other, I couldn’t believe how much my feelings about this had changed. I was still firmly on Team Katniss for all the reasons Malinda Lo outlined, but if she was going to wind up with one of the boys, I didn’t see how it could be anyone other than Peeta. I think Angie Manfredi’s argument that being on Team Peeta is a feminist statement is an interesting one (she also mentioned in an email to the YALSA-bk listserv that Peeta does stereotypically “feminine” things, whereas Gale does “masculine” things like mining and hunting), but for me it’s was more an in-world consideration of Katniss’s future. Especially with her nightmares and Peeta’s ability to comfort her, I don’t see how she could wind up with anyone who wouldn’t be able to understand her time in the arena, that part of her life that had so shaped who she was–and Peeta (and possibly Haymitch) is the only one who could ever understand that. Gale could comfort her and try to offer her normalcy, but being in the Games so changed her that I don’t think she could return to that normal life like I’d previously wanted for her. If it was going to be anyone, it was going to be Peeta.

The first time I read Catching Fire, I was caught by surprise at Katniss’s return to the Games. I’d been hoping for more on the mounting rebellion in the second book, and to have her return to the arena almost felt recycled. But after re-reading it (especially doing so immediately after finishing The Hunger Games), I was struck by how putting Katniss back in the arena did give us a chance to see the growing rebellion. Her preparation for the Games and then her time actually competing was markedly different because of the way the tributes were friends, acknowledged each other, and even stood in solidarity against the Capitol. The preparation and competition were peppered with incidents of teamwork and defiance–and really, these stories are told from Katniss’s perspective, so seeing small things like the tributes standing hand-in-hand after their interviews or the sacrifice that Mags made was a more realistic introduction to the rebellion than some sort of seismic political change or bloody invasion or whatever. In Catching Fire, we get a very local view of how everyday life is changing and how even big events seemingly entirely under the Capitol’s control are showing weakness.

I also think that sending Katniss back to the Games was a good way to make whatever happened in Mockingjay even more shocking and different. The Capitol’s grip on the population certainly wasn’t strong enough to have another round of the Games, and the danger Katniss was in after being snatched from the arena–and the unknown perils Peeta was facing since he wasn’t rescued!–was much more immediate than the relatively gentle cliffhanger at the end of The Hunger Games. After reading the first two books in the series, you know that whatever comes next in the third book was going to be different and much more dangerous.

Mockingjay
And was Mockingjay ever different! This was a very grim book. I mean, the subject material in the first two books is surprisingly heavy, but it had a dash of adventure to it with Katniss trying to fight for her life and survive another day, another minute. There was some excitement in the prospect of a rebellion against the evil Capitol. But in Mockingjay, we’re thrown into the dirty, gritty details of that rebellion, and there’s nothing adventurous or exciting about it.

Katniss is a broken shell of her former self, haunted by nightmares and a directionless anxiety. She’s having a hard time getting by on a day-to-day basis, and her relationships are fractured. Life in District 13 isn’t some sort of paradise where refugees from District 12 are living happy lives–it’s strictly-regulated with daily schedules, brutally-enforced portion control at meals, and plenty of knowledge available only on a need-to-know basis. Life–and the narrative of that life–feels hopeless and dark and relentlessly soul-crushing.

But as strictly-regulated as life in District 13 is, there’s also a certain lack of structure in that no one knows what the future holds. In the earlier books, there was structure for both the characters and the readers in the rituals around the Games. But in Mockingjay, there are no Games and all of the previous structure provided by life in the oppressive grip of the Capitol are gone. There’s less direction, less certainty, less assurance that things will go as planned–or that there will even be a world left in which things and plans exist. The rebels might win against the Capitol, but they might be utterly crushed, and even if they did win, at what cost would that victory come?

The horrors of people’s lives up until that point–being in the Games or being firebombed out of District 12–and the strain of the rebellion and the integration into District 13 and the fear and uncertainty of the future take their toll on everyone. Katniss struggles mentally to hold together the pieces of her life, but so do lots of other people around her. The survivors of the Games are the worst off, and it seems like everyone is on the brink of insanity. This is a very psychological story. Katniss is literally unable to function in certain situations, and other characters make progress only to be shattered again by a simple reminder of the horrors of the past. Everyone is constantly revisiting their own worst moments, unable to escape them. I really can’t talk enough about how dark and anxiety-filled this story is.

That emotional trauma and brokenness and the horror of war seem to be the focus of Mockingjay. The first two books certainly dealt with the perverted pleasure our society takes in violence, and with violence as a means of control, but all of that is turned up to 11 in Mockingjay. Not only is the Capitol bombing hospitals as a form of psychological warfare, the rebels themselves are torturing prisoners, developing weapons that target the weak, and using propaganda to rally citizens in every district. Especially by the end, we see that Coin is no better than Snow–and is maybe even worse. This isn’t a simple story of good versus evil, or the citizens versus the government, or hope versus oppression. It is just violence against violence, inhumanity against inhumanity, with no end in sight.

And Collins creating this world of violence and darkness doesn’t come from nowhere. The rebellion seems like it’s especially violent and the Capitol especially evil, but I think there are real parallels to our world now. Especially for teens who have grown up with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who have maybe had older siblings or cousins or parents go and fight and maybe return or maybe not (or for those actual young adults who have been to war), I think the scenes of walking through the deserted streets of the Capitol, wary of the traps the government has left that might at any moment kill some or all of them must seem especially real. Is there any real difference between the Capitol’s pods and roadside bombs in Afghanistan? Is our bombing of weddings all that different than the Capitol’s bombing of a hospital?

And that kind of darkness seems to reside in individual people as well. In the previous books, Katniss was confronted with her own brutality as she realized that she was utterly focused on survival, whereas Peeta was trying to retain his humanity in the face of the Games. She didn’t understand that idea at first when they sat on the roof together before their first time in the arena, but she later saw what he was saying, that she didn’t want to just be another piece in the Capitol’s games. And in Mockingjay, she’s again confronted by her own inner darkness. We’re not just talking a little character flaw here: there’s a real cruelty inside Katniss that she often has to fight against. She worries about using people in her own games and at the end when the rebels have successfully overthrown the Capitol, she votes to have a final Hunger Games with children of the Capitol to rub their faces in their defeat. And the final act that allowed the rebels to triumph was the bombing of children and then the medics who tried to save them–and I do think that it was the rebels who set off those bombs and not the Capitol. It seems that Collins is saying that within all of us–both in our characters and in our psyches–there is a darkness capable of incredible cruelty and destruction.

I think that the love triangle–or what remained of it in Mockingjay, since Katniss is completely incapable of dealing with other people in any way–embodies the essential, overarching struggle in this whole trilogy. Peeta represents retaining our humanity, compassion, and having limits to what we’ll do to get what we want, even to survive. For Peeta, the ends do not justify the means. Gale, on the other hand, is single-minded in his drive to overthrown the Capitol. He is willing to kill children and medics to win. He doesn’t understand Katniss’s compassion for her prep team; for him, they’re simply part of the Capitol’s machine. And in Mockingjay, it seems like Gale is going to survive and that Peeta is not. Peeta is presumed dead, Peeta seems to have capitulated to the Capitol, Peeta is so completely no longer himself that he wants to kill Katniss, Peeta is a broken shell of his former self that cannot tell reality from propaganda. But by the end, while Gale has a fancy new job assigned to him by the rebels, Peeta has regained his humanity and it is with him–with that recognition of maintaining our compassion and our ability to empathize and know when we are fighting evil with evil–that Katniss lives out the rest of her life. Readers who are still upset that Katniss didn’t wind up with Gale miss the entire point of the trilogy.

Katniss’s struggle against being another piece in the Capitol’s games at first brought to mindTally’s struggle to write her own story in the Uglies trilogy. Throughout each of the books, it seems like she’s a pawn in someone else’s powerplay, and the final scene in the book is about her finally being able to take charge of the direction of her own life, to be her own person. It seems hopeful. But even though Mockingjay ends with relative peace, with Katniss returning to District 12 and restarting a life there, with her and Peeta together, and even–in the future–with children, I didn’t feel that sense of hope at the end. Even though she was moving on, it seemed like she was irrevocably broken and the best she could hope for was that her children would have a whole and happy life. Katniss might be able to go on and live a life with Peeta, but she’s never going to get a fresh start. She’s always going to carry with her what happened–what she saw, what she did, what happened to all of the people that she lost. When I finished the last sentence of Mockingjay and closed the book, I still felt haunted by what had happened. I felt such heartbreak over everything that had happened, over the brokenness in everyone’s lives, and all the pain they’d experienced. How could anyone ever be whole again after that?

I think, too, that Prim’s death is especially heartbreaking because it comes at the very end, it’s senseless, and she seemed to have been doing okay. It seemed like Katniss was going to be forever broken, but that Prim might have some hope because of Katniss shielding her, that she might become a doctor and have a better life than she would have in District 12, despite everything that happened to get her there. But then her death is part of an especially heinous act on the part of the group that seemingly gave her those opportunities. What I think is really interesting, though, is that I was so emotionally invested in her and her future that her death was heartbreaking–but children being sacrificed for no good reason (for evil, even) is exactly what had happened every year for the last 75 years in the Hunger Games. I guess it can be easy for all of those children who died in the arena to just become numbers, but Collins makes sure you get the emotional impact of a character being senselessly cut down in her prime at least once. You take that emotional devastation and extrapolate over generations to see the brutality of the Huger Games–and then extrapolate again to our own world, to our own wars, to our own cruelty.

Some final thoughts
I think Mockingjay is absolutely the most powerful of the trilogy. In it, we get more: more information about the world in which Katniss lives, more violence and survival, more confrontation of the darkness within and around us, and more wrestling with man’s inhumanity to man. But it’s also very different than the first three books, and I can certainly imagine readers walking away from Mockingjay feeling betrayed or disappointed or hurt. I don’t really see how the series could have ended any other way, though.

I was sort of surprised that I didn’t hate the epilogue. I really hated the epilogue in the last Harry Potter book; it felt like a fanfic where everything turns out just! fine! and look! at all! the extra! good! stuff! The epilogue here seems similar at first blush–Katniss and Peeta living together in District 12 with babies!–but it doesn’t carry a happy ending feel. It still feels like Katniss is broken and the only real hope is in future generations who won’t know the devastation that she did. That’s a very removed sort of happy ending! And while I’ve heard some cry foul over Katniss settling down, losing her fire (or something like that), and having children, I think that change in her character–that she’s not out crusading in another district like Gale, that she finally acquiesced to having children–shows that her experiences have changed her, and illustrates that tenuous hope for the future. It felt like it fit.

I’ve seen a short-hand summary of all fantasy novels that goes something like “good triumphs over evil, but not without cost.” In general I think that’s actually pretty accurate, but with the Hunger Games trilogy more than any other book, I feel like the good has never been so tenuously surviving and the evil so insidious and the cost so high. There’s no clear-cut good and evil here, but there is the idea that sometimes fighting evil requires too much darkness of yourself and that the ends don’t justify the means–and this is the idea that I think triumphs in Mockingjay. Our humanity is the only thing that keeps us from being monsters, but holding on to that humanity can seem hopeless, and it may feel like we’ve lost it already. But by propping each other up even when we feel we’re broken, by recognizing the humanity of even our enemies, by not answering violence with violence, we can maybe repair ourselves and our world. Maybe.

Where do we go from here
The Huffington Post featured six children’s books to read after finishing Mockingjay, and that list has been met with widespread derision because it includes–no, seriously–Amelia Bedelia. Is Peter Steinberg high? This list must have started out as his favorite children’s books and then an editor was like, “Hey, Mockingjay, that’s a kid’s book, right? That’s a big deal now, so let’s tie your list in with that!” because there’s no way that someone who’s just finished Mockingjay and is asking for more is going to be satisfied with an Amelia Bedelia book.

In response, a number of bloggers have made lists of their own, and you’re going to be much happier with their suggestions. Here’s a selection:

• GreenBeenTeenQueen: Tween Dystopias
• Tor.com: After the Smoke Clears (with teen and adult titles)
• Bookshelves of Doom: YA Dystopian Fight-y Books, other dystopian picks, books with similar elements and themes, and old-school recommendations
• Novel Novice: other dystopian reads
• Novel Novice: upcoming dystopian titles

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3 Comments September 3, 2010