In the acknowledgments page of her YA novel Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins thanks her father for his efforts to find a way to teach children about the reality of war and peace. It is clear in the third book of The Hunger Games trilogy that Collins has found a way to continue her father’s work. The novel is dark, ambiguous, and shocking because war will never form together into a tidy little package.
The Mockingjay is unleashed against the Capital
Mockingjay is the darkest book of the trilogy. Gone is the safety net of only twenty-four participants in a battle to the death. Anyone and everyone can be blown to ash as an act of war. Katniss is no longer in a stable enough place to be considered a reliable narrator. Her fellow former victors are harvested by the Capital or the rebellion as key strategists in the war.
The elaborate death traps and mutations still exist. Collins does not celebrate them with great detail as she did in the first two books. Katniss is numb to the manipulation of the Capital in the same way that she can only feel the pain of the ever increasing death toll in her nightmares. The pods that explode to unleash unimaginable pain and destruction are more horrifying than ever before. Katniss is just incapable of responding to them unless customized for her own experience.
Much like the Mockingjay in The Hunger Games and self-sacrifice in Catching Fire, Mockingjay has a recurring but not overwhelming image that defines the tone of the novel. It is the smell of one of President Snow’s genetically altered roses. Katniss encounters a fresh bud in her Victory Village home and is haunted by Snow’s promise to destroy her for the rest of the book. It is not a steady presence of doom; it is a shock to the system as that rose smell is the one thing that forces Katniss to deal with the reality of her situation.
After the disappointment of Catching Fire, which was almost a self-indulgent exercise in exploring Katniss’ psyche, it’s quite remarkable to see that Collins was capable of exploring PTSD in a believable way. Not only do you believe that Katniss is suffering from the psychological ramifications of two trips to the Hunger Games, you believe that Katniss is still a teenage girl who is not very good at picking up on social cues.
The difference between the successful novels in the trilogy and the failure is the believability of the narrator. Katniss did not act like Katniss until the last few pages of Catching Fire, which made the whole novel feel like an exercise in needless manipulation. From the first page of Mockingjay, Katniss is back. Without her, The Hunger Games trilogy would just be an exercise in literary destruction. With her, they’re powerful, accessible, and thoughtful novels about government responsibility, fighting for what’s right, and the psychological and social ramifications of war. Conflict is inevitable. How you choose to respond to it is your choice.
Thoughts? Love to hear them.
“From the first page of Mockingjay, Katniss is back. Without her, The Hunger Games trilogy would just be an exercise in literary destruction”
This is a really interesting point, in what way do you think the series are are literary destruction and how does Katniss abate this? I’ve been on the fence about the trilogy for a long while, and I’d love to hear more of your theory.
My review: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
If Collins hadn’t bothered to develop such a well-rounded character as Katniss, the books would be the equivalent of a body count slasher film. There would be all this pain and destruction with a cliched survivor girl and no reason to care.
Katniss’ empathy for seemingly everyone she comes in contact with really raises the level of discourse. She’s not a particularly social character, but she does care for others even when her own survival depends on distancing herself from the violence. If we didn’t care about Katniss, how could we care about Peeta, Ru, Prim, Mags, or any of the other characters with big emotional scenes? I harp on this with horror all the time. If you don’t have believable characters, you’re wasting everyone’s time. The second book actually suffered from this through the bloodbath, which was quite a way to go before Katniss suddenly thought about other people again.
That’s a really good point about emotional investment in horror movies. I think a lot of my problem was that I wasn’t invested in any of the characters really; possibly my own reading style. More than that though, I didn’t quite follow Katniss’s motivations. For large parts she was compassionate to everyone regardless of what she owed them, but at others she was happy to violently electrocute peers, and then send the Capitol’s children into a Hunger Games. This inconsistency created a distance between the reader and the character for me. I think you’re right though, Collins does well to avoid the story becoming a slasher movie-style blood bath.
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