So, bookworms, it’s been two weeks and I’ve had time to read and digest, then re-read and digest some more all things Mockingjay. So here’s my requisite Mockingjay post. It’s not really a review; rather, it’s a collection of random thoughts that I wrote down in the immediate aftermath of reading the book, then shaped into something that made sense.
Fair warning: it’s really spoiler-y, so proceed at your own risk. It’s also really, really long. (Sorry – old English major habits die hard.)
Surprises
This novel constantly surprised me, which is probably not a shock since I had no idea what was going to happen (all of my previous predictions were wrong), but there were a lot of other things that snuck up on me as well. The twists and turns Collins took with the story blew me away – some of them (Finnick’s backstory, for example) were things I could have never even guessed. I was kept on the edge of my seat the entire time I was reading, with plenty of OMFG and WTF moments. Collins had no fears and no qualms about making difficult and shocking choices.
But the biggest surprises came from the characters: surprise at how they acted and behaved and surprise at how I reacted to those behaviors. Characters I thought I knew and loved disappointed me, while characters I was ready to dismiss (Johanna) showed new sides. The two characters who best represent my surprise were Haymitch and Gale.
Like so many citizens of Panem, I just figured Haymitch for a drunk who couldn’t care less. And, like Katniss, I was furious with him at the end of Catching Fire for playing a game with people’s lives. I was prepared to continue to dislike him to the end. As Mockingjay went on, though, I began to see how alike Katniss and Haymitch really were, how well they understood each other. Finding out that his entire family had been killed with two weeks of his Games victory put a lot of things in perspective – his drinking, his fear for District 12’s tributes, his desire to change. Most importantly, I saw how Haymitch was one of the few people willing to always tell Katniss the absolute truth. He didn’t sugercoat, he didn’t lie, he didn’t hide – he was always exactly himself, even when people didn’t like him. Honesty – true honesty – was in short supply in Panem during the rebellion, so I appreciated Haymitch all the more for his.
Gale. Oh Gale, why did you have to go and break my heart? I was an ardent Gale fan prior to Mockingjay, but I’ve renounced my Team Gale membership. I found myself so disappointed with him because he made me hate him. Gale had always had rebellious and anti-Capitolist tendencies, but it wasn’t until he was fully involved with the fight that I realized how narrow his focus really was. The first hint came in chapter 4, when he couldn’t understand why Katniss would want to save her prep team. This short-sightedness, this inability to understand how and why the prep team matter, made me realize that Gale had drunk the District 13 revolution kool-aid and couldn’t see beyond his own goals. He couldn’t see nuance or individual people. Instead, he lumped people together and made broad, stereotypical generalizations: the prep team came from the Capitol, so therefore they much be bad.
I wanted to be wrong about him, but throughout the story, he kept making me angrier and angrier: getting chummy with President Coin, his constant disagreements with Katniss, his weapon building with Beetee – these incidents shed light on his “win at all costs” attitude. But it wasn’t until the Nut incident in District 2, when he was willing to kill hundreds of people, to sacrifice people he never knew, because he held a grudge against them for District 12’s bombing that I realized how far gone he was.
One of Collins’ themes is the idea that war changes us, changes who we are. War forces us to ask ourselves how far we’re willing to go for our cause, forces you to consider the cost of the win and, for example, if civilian casualties are ever acceptable. For Gale, the war meant he was willing to let a large group of people die – people he had never met and who had never directly hurt him – all for the greater good of a much larger group. Maybe that’s justifiable – Gale certainly thought so. Katniss didn’t. I don’t either and I hated how easy it was for Gale to kill other people, how easily he got caught up in the rebellion. It didn’t necessarily feel out of character for him – in some ways, he had always been headed in that direction – but it did make me dislike him. He became cold and calculating, and that was even before his fire-bomb parachutes killed Prim. After that, I washed my hands of him. I couldn’t condone his actions. To his credit, I think he realized this when he tells Katniss he knows that she’ll never be able to see him without thinking he killed her sister.
“Remember who the enemy is”
In Catching Fire, before Katniss returns to the arena for a second time, Haymitch reminds her, “just remember who the enemy is” (pg. 260). The enemy isn’t always easy to identify. The enemy you think you’re fighting could just as easily be someone you should be helping. It’s a necessarily reminder because it’s not always obvious who the bad guys are – and in Mockingjay, the good guys and bad guys were a lot alike.
In a move that seems to fit in perfectly with the dystopian world she had created, Collins created a District 13 that was just as bad as the Capitol. Sure, they operated under the guise of rebellion and freeing the districts of Panem from oppression, but District 13 was ultimately the flip side of the Capitol coin – they used the same tactics, tools and tricks to gain power and control. They were playing the same game, with a different name. Sure, the Capitol and President Snow were still evil, still needed to be overthrown, but District 13 had an authoritarian government of its own. And they were willing to travel down the same path as the Capitol if it meant that they would gain control of the country.
Katniss is smart enough to pick up on this – when President Coin subtly and vaguely threatens her over the immunity deal (at the end of chapter 4), Katniss recognizes that she’s “still in the game” and that Coin is just “another force to contend with, another power player who has decided to use me as a piece in her games” (pg. 59). But this becomes most obvious at the end, when Katniss realizes it was District 13 – and Coin – that sent the fire-bomb parachutes to kill the children (and Prim) and when Coin proposes another Hunger Games. Instead of making things better, Coin and the District 13 officials were willing to do exactly what the Capitol had done – sacrifice children for entertainment. And if she was willing to go down that path once, what’s to stop her from doing it again? District 13 was supposed to be “the good guys,” but they were also just like the enemy, willing to blur the ethical and moral lines.
On the other side of the enemy question were the Capitol citizens and Capitol sympathizers. While the Capitol government and Snow were definitely “bad guys,” these people couldn’t easily be classified as “enemy.” Some people, consumed with a narrow-minded attitude (like Gale, Coin and others) automatically considered anyone from the Capitol or anyone who worked for the Capitol (like the citizens in District 2) as enemy.
But Katniss knew otherwise. She knew her prep team and Cinna. She saw the confusion during the Capitol’s evacuation and the children who thought the parachutes were bringing gifts. She described them as innocents, children and that’s an apt description. Taken outside of the Capitol, these people didn’t know how to function, let alone survive, because they had surrendered any ability to take care of themselves. As Plutarch’s Panem et Circenses explanation proves, they gave up their responsibility and power for full bellies and entertainment.
Yes, certainly there were Capitol citizens who were complicit in the oppression of the districts, but a lot of them were under just as much control as the rest of the country. Sure, their lives were much easier, but they were also much more pathetic. They didn’t realize how trapped they were because they didn’t know what they were giving up. They were kept in a state of life that made them completely unable to help themselves, completely unable to even understand that they needed to defend themselves. Indiscriminately killing all of the Capitol residents, simply because they were Capitol residents, was just as bad as Snow killing district residents. District 13 wanted to make it easy – they wanted to cast the Capitol in the role of “bad guy.” The truth – and the enemy – was just much more complicated.
Real or Not Real section
Peeta’s “real or not real” game was designed to help him reclaim his real memories, but it also provides interesting commentary on two of the most prominent themes in Mockingjay.
From the very beginning, Panem is obsessed with television entertainment. The Hunger Games are broadcast for the entire country to see and Katniss gets caught up in game after game, manipulation after manipulation, forced to play a part by those in charge. Even during the rebellion, there was the battle of the propos (televised propaganda spots), each side using television and “reality” to sway supporters to their side. But it wasn’t real – it was all a game, a set-up by those in charge.
The connection, of course, is that our own world is similarly caught up in commercialized “reality” television and the “celebrities” it creates. We watch “reality” competitions where people are pitted against one another, then we call in to vote for our favorites. But just like in Panem, it’s not real. “Reality” television blurs the line between what’s actually real and what the news casters and television programmers tell us is real. And, just like Panem, our wars are packaged and presented with a bow on top, designed to make us feel good about the cause. But that’s not real war, just like the dueling Captiol-District 13 propos aren’t real war. They’re tools, used for a specific purpose. We’re made to think they’re real, when they couldn’t be further from it.
The most obvious theme, though, is the idea of real war and real aftermath. Mockingjay is marketed and shelved as a book for young adults, for teens – for children. And yet it deals so honestly and starkly with the very real consequences of war: how it hurts everyone, good or bad; how it takes and wastes innocent lives without second thought; how it can create a vicious cycle of hatred and revenge, how it can change people and turn them into people you don’t recognize (Gale, and even Peeta to a degree); how it destroys, as Peeta says, “everything you are.”
Collins doesn’t shy away from these realities. Mockingjay is not an uplifting book. There is a lot of violence and a lot of death. Characters we’ve come to love and care for don’t survive the fighting. Collins isn’t trying to be cruel to her readers, just honest – because real war takes people’s lives just as easily. Mockingjay also doesn’t have a completely happily-ever-after ending, because real war – like Panem’s war – isn’t just about the people who die or are visibly injured. It’s also about the psychological toll.
Peeta’s torture and “hijacking” become a metaphor for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Katniss loses people to fates other than death (the end of her friendship with Gale, her mother’s grief) and is left to cope with memories and nightmares she can’t escape. Haymitch still drinks. Yes, there’s hope at the end, because hope helps keep the darkness away, but it’s imperfect. That hope comes at a cost. No matter how happy things seem at the end, war still lingers. Katniss does get happiness, but she also gets the reminders of all that happened. That’s the real affect of war and that’s what Collins doesn’t shy away from.
Lastly, here are some final thoughts on the whole romantic triangle subplot. I know the romance aspect of the book isn’t the most important part, but I fully admit to getting caught up in Team Peeta vs. Team Gale. At first, I was Team Gale, but that obviously didn’t last (see above). I wasn’t inclined to automatically jump ship to Team Peeta, though. But the more I think about it, then more I like how this triangle was resolved.
I didn’t like Peeta in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. He annoyed me. But hijacked Peeta in Mockingjay, well, he was much more interesting when he was being a jerk, even if it was only the result of super-intense brainwashing. I felt better about the end result because I think the hijacking plot allowed for a couple of things: first, it allowed Peeta to finally see Katniss for who she really was, flaws and all. He saw all the times she manipulated him, all the times she played him for the sake of the game. It even allowed him to hate her for some of the decisions she made. Second, the hijacking finally made Katniss appreciate the real Peeta, who he had been before the brainwashing. She didn’t fully appreciate what she had until she realized it had been taken away from her.
As Peeta tried to fix his mind and as Katniss eventually tried to help, they were able to move forward. Their previous relationship hadn’t been real – Peeta loved Katniss almost obsessively, without even really knowing her. Katniss pretended to love Peeta for the sake of the Games. But once they were able to get away from all that – away from the cameras, away from the politics and manipulation – they were able to rebuild their relationship based on something real. So when Peeta asks her, at the end, “You love me. Real or not real?” it makes perfect sense for Katniss to answer, “real.”
Phew. I’m exhausted, bookworms. Mockingjay has definitely given me plenty of food for thought. How about you – what do you think of my impossibly long post-mortem? Thoughts of your own you’d like to add? Comment away!
