by Leah Wilson, Jennifer Barnes, Mary Borsellino, Sarah Brennan
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.
The Arena: A Maze of Tricks and Traps
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.
These are all things Katniss can learn and then predict. But what makes the Games so treacherous is that even the things that should be predictable frequently aren’t—and being caught unaware, by another tribute or by one of the Gamemakers’ toys, can lead to death. After all, these “toys” are specifically designed to catch tributes unaware.
Snares—physical and psychological—play crucial roles in Collins’ trilogy. Snares are by nature hidden: a passive weapon, they are usually some kind of net or wire that is camouflaged, often cleverly buried in leaf litter, to trap unsuspecting game so that they may be more easily killed later. Snares are considered fair play for the hunter, and the first ones the reader encounters seem innocuous enough—as long as you aren’t a rabbit or squirrel caught in one of Gale’s ingenious traps. But in the arena the victims are not rabbits, but humans. Ill-fated Rue, certainly one of the most compelling characters in the series, meets her death in The Hunger Games when she is caught in a net and then speared like a helpless rabbit or fawn.
Catching Fire extends the concept of snares with Beetee’s masterful, rather complicated use of wire to electrify the area of the jungle near the Cornucopia, and thus kill two of the other tributes. And the urban battleground of Mockingjay is literally a minefield of snares—fiendish pods that lay in wait for passersby and that incorporate the Capitol’s weapons, either familiar ones from the arena games or new, even more nefarious creations.
But the series’ most memorable snare of all doesn’t need a net. In a tried and true terrorist device borrowed from our world, bombs hidden in parachutes are dropped from a hovercraft with the Capitol insignia onto a group of children outside of Snow’s mansion. Parachutes are familiar to the kids from watching the Games: they deliver presents, good things. But these parachutes are deadly, exploding when the children grab them. And as rebel medics, horrified Capitol Peacekeepers, and citizens rush in to help, a second fiery bomb explodes, maiming and killing the would-be rescuers.
This brilliant amoral snare, a more complex, heinous version of one of Gale and Beetee’s traps, works because it understands the psychology of its targets and uses that understanding to undo them. Reluct
antly Katniss comes to believe the exploding parachutes are the work of the rebellion. But everyone else remains convinced the Capitol is responsible for the unconscionable devastation; after all, the weapon bears all the hallmarks of Snow and company’s brutally effective mind games
Mutts—short for “muttations,” the foul genetic products of the Capitol’s continued quest for means to subdue Panem’s citizens—are another of the Gamemakers’ favorite weapons. In the first book, mutts resembling huge wolves attack Katniss, Peeta, and Cato at the Cornucopia. But it is when Katniss looks into the beasts’ eyes that the true horror of the mutts is revealed: Rue, Foxface, all the dead tributes, allies and foes alike, stare out at her. In case she is in doubt she sees the number eleven on the collar circling the neck of the one whose eyes belong to District 11’s tribute, Rue. Jabberjays are manipulated to mimic the agonized cries of people dear to the tributes, and in the second Games, they practically drive Katniss and Finnick to suicide. Then there are the tracker jackers, armed with hallucinogenic venom. Katniss herself is stung during the first Games and, even with a mild dose, experiences mind-bending apparitions. One of her ghoulish visions shows “ants crawl[ing] out of the blisters on my hands.” She later she tells us that the “nature of [the] venom ... target[s] the place where fear lives in your brain” (The Hunger Games). And of course it is tracker jacker venom that President Snow uses on Peeta to alter his memories of Katniss.
What all these weapons have in common is that, at their core, they are about deception. The snares rely on deception to lure their victims in, whether they appear to be safe, solid ground (but turn out to be a net) or a parachuted care package (but turn out to be a bomb). The jabberjays and the wolf mutts that attack Katniss and Peeta at the end of the first Games are also effective only through deception: it’s the tributes’ belief that they are hearing their loved ones being tortured (or that the jabberjays are repeating their loved ones’ screams) and Katniss and Peeta’s initial belief that they are seeing the dead tributes looking through the mutts’ eyes that makes them truly horrific. And deception is at the very heart of the tracker jackers’ effectiveness; their venom’s power is in rendering victims unable to tell what is real from what is not.
After the initial surprise, Katniss is able to cope with the deceptions used against her by the Gamemakers. What challenges Katniss most are the psychological deceptions she must take part in to survive—the costumes, the interviews, but in particular, the deception involving Peeta. It takes all her willpower to go along with Haymitch’s strategy, spelled out during their first meal in the Training Center, that she and Peeta are to feign friendship. Katniss is comfortable play-acting the absence of emotion, but pretending that she and Peeta are linked emotionally is repugnant to her. It’s an out-and-out lie, but, like many others in Katniss’ odyssey, one she must embrace. Katniss agrees to it, but she does so with great skepticism. Eventually she will have to kill Peeta, or he’ll have to kill her. Her promise to Prim makes it perfectly clear to her who is going to kill whom in the end. So what is the purpose in pretending?
After all, while the Hunger Games have many rules—and part of the deception is the way rules change midway through the fray—there is one rule Katniss believes is immutable: the lone victor takes no prisoners, leaves no survivors. The Games have always worked that way—until now, when the Gamemakers pull a double switch-a-roo. Their first change—two tributes from the same district can both be victors if they are the last two tributes standing. But when Peeta and Katniss emerge victorious, the rules abruptly change back again—only one of them will be permitted to live. It’s a deception it does not occur to Katniss to be wary of, and one she refuses to abide by. With bold defiance, she uses her knack for circumventing the Capitol’s rules to save both herself and Peeta.
Of course, Katniss’ defiance brings severe repercussions. Midaction Katniss doesn’t consider what this will mean for her after the Games, or for her mother and Prim. In retrospect this seems naïve of her—after her time in the arena, hasn’t she learned that nothing is certain in the shifting realities of Snow’s Panem?
The reward of the Games has always been security and freedom from want for the victor (or in this case, victors) and his or her family. But Katniss’ bitter lesson comes via President Snow. He decrees that if she doesn’t obey his new directives, everything and everyone she loves will be destroyed. His directives are simple: continue the charade of love for Peeta or else. Later we learn that the idea that winning the Games means safety and happiness is itself a deception, and not just for Katniss. Haymitch should have been a clue, but it is not until Finnick shocks Panem with a tell-all on a rebellion-controlled broadcast that we truly understand how much of a lie it is. “In a flat removed tone ... ” Finnick tells us that his image as “golden boy” back in the Capitol was a sham (Mockingjay). The glamor and glitter of his life as a victor cloaks a truly sordid reality: handsome, desirable, idolized by the viewers of the Games, Finnick was condemned by Snow to serve as a sex slave, forced to sell his body to Snow’s allies as a favor or to other wealthy Capitol denizens for great sums of money destined for Snow’s deep pockets. Refusing to follow Snow’s orders was unthinkable. Any protest would doom the people he loved.
Finnick’s revelations unmask the real post-Games plight of the victors: there’s no safe house to return to from the arena. No promises will be kept. As long as they live they can never drop their guards again.
Who’s on My Side, Anyway?
As challenging as discerning the Capitol’s deceptions proves, both inside the arena and out, it is the question of whom Katniss can trust that most plagues her. As the series progresses, Katniss grows increasingly aware of hidden agendas: In The Hunger Games, Peeta’s, Haymitch’s, and certainly Snow’s; in Catching Fire, Plutarch Heavensbee’s, Cinna’s, and some of the leaders and members of the rebellion’s; in Mockingjay, of course there is Coin. Who’s telling the truth? Who knew what and when? As Katniss puts it very clearly in Mockingjay when she critiques her own performance for the propo in support of the rebels, she becomes “... a puppet being manipulated by unseen forces.” Though referring at that point only to her bad performance in the scripted propo, she might as well be talking about her appropriation by the rebellion.
Trust is a dangerous commodity in Panem. In the first book, even in the relative seclusion of the forest Katniss lowers her voice when discussing the reaping with Gale because “even here you worry someone would hear you.” As it turns out, this was not just paranoia—Snow reveals the fact that her hunting excursions with Gale—including the one time they actually kissed—were all reported to him.
Katniss knows she cannot trust the Capitol. But even the behavior of those she should be able to trust is frequently revealed to be questionable—at times even purposely deceitful.
Haymitch: Not What You See, Not What You Get
Haymitch—oh, dear drunken Haymitch. The old souse is a walking—more like a staggering—conundrum. Rereading The Hunger Games I realize even from the moment where Katniss is standing on stage after the citizens of the district give her their silent farewell salute, he saves her losing her stoic demeanor and bursting into tears. Utterly blotto, he stumbles onto the stage and shouts how he likes her, she’s got “spunk,” and then he actually points to the Capitol’s TV cameras taping the whole event, and seemingly taunts the Capitol by saying she has more spunk “than you!” Then he tumbles off the stage.
Haymitch’s continued inebriation is no act, and yet he is startlingly aware—in the way that a long-term alcoholic can be—of exactly what is going on around him and what he is doing. So is his act spontaneous or staged? Is he calculating to get the cameras off Katniss? Is his boozy diatribe a drunken outburst, or is it a message to the Capitol?
From the very first book we know Haymitch is more than what he first appears. He is more than capable of making decisions without consulting those his decisions affect—as when he has Peeta announce his feelings for Katniss during the
pregame interview without warning Katniss ahead of time. Yet Katniss trusts him enough to broker a deal in Catching Fire: Haymitch and Peeta collaborated to save her in the first Games; in the Quarter Quell, it’s Peeta’s turn to be saved. But after being rescued from the arena, she is furious to learn that deal was a ruse and the rebellion leaders, with Haymitch’s input, opted to save her, not Peeta. On the hovercraft she physically strikes out at him.
During Mockingjay she puts as much distance between them as she can in such tight quarters, still stung by his betrayal. Katniss frequently refuses to obey him, ripping off her earpiece when sent into District 8, ignoring his orders, and almost getting herself killed. Her feelings toward Haymitch are complicated: part of her is glad he is undergoing terrible withdrawal symptoms in the teetotalling environment of District 13. But later she worries he is so sick he might die. Then the next moment she reminds herself she doesn’t care. When they do finally have face-to-face time alone, they both admit they failed to keep Peeta safe—though nothing they could have done in the arena would have saved him. The guilt they both feel is not resolved, and yet they are at least honest with each other. And by the end of the book she at least trusts that he will understand why she says “yes” to Coin’s proposal for one last Hunger Games and that he will back her up by saying yes, too.