“I WILL BE YOUR MOCKINGJAY”
The Power and Paradox of Metaphor in the Hunger Games Trilogy
In the arena that the Capitol created for the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen faces a host of deadly threats. First there are the unnatural disasters that the Gamemakers have created in their grisly enclosure: fires, thunderstorms, poisonous fruits, and savage beasts. Then there are the twenty-three other tributes, teenagers from each of the districts of Panem, sent to battle one another until all but one are dead. For the other tributes, Katniss’s death would just be one more step on the way to their own salvation. To fend off these dangers, Katniss has obvious strengths, such as being an adept hunter with a bow and arrow. However, her archery skill may not be her greatest strength. Rather, her survival, and ultimately the survival of all of the people of Panem, rides on the power of a simple turn of phrase: a metaphor.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that involves a comparison between two things that may seem unlike at first but that are actually similar in some meaningful way. In the Hunger Games trilogy, metaphors and other symbols show how both Katniss and the Capitol choose to define themselves. As tributes and soldiers alike understand, the fight against the Capitol is conducted with more than just guns and explosives. Alongside the physical fight is an ideological battle of words, images, and associations.
Throughout the Hunger Games trilogy, we see metaphors and other symbols crafted as tools of destruction and empowerment, oppression and emancipation. Katniss, fighting to interpret the metaphors that define her and her cause, often has the choice of interpreting a metaphor in a way that’s empowering or hopeless. When the Capitol and later some rebel leaders try to use metaphors to limit her understanding of who she is and what she’s capable of becoming, Katniss has the power to interpret these varied metaphors in ways that give her strength and the ability to figure out who she really is.
Words and Images Catching Fire
In Katniss’s narrations of her experience throughout the Hunger Games trilogy, metaphors and similes abound. One characteristic of metaphors is that they have multiple associations. Consider the scene in which Katniss and Prim prepare for the reaping for the 74th Hunger Games. “I protect Prim in every way I can,” Katniss says, “but I’m powerless against the reaping. The anguish I always feel wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face. I notice her blouse has pulled out of her skirt in the back again and force myself to stay calm. ‘Tuck your tail in, little duck,’ I say, smoothing the blouse back in place.”1
Katniss describes her sister as a little duck with its tail, her blouse, untucked. One association this metaphor has is literal, grounded in a very ordinary truth: the shape of Prim’s untucked blouse resembles a duck’s tail. But metaphors also carry conceptual associations. A duckling is young, and so is Prim. A duckling is not a predator; it has a natural innocence, and so does Prim. A duckling is defenseless against predators, just as Prim is defenseless against the reaping. A duckling depends on its mother to protect it, and Prim depends on Katniss. Youth, innocence, defenselessness, and dependence: what a web of associations one simple metaphor can weave! It’s characteristic of metaphors to be literal while also conveying an abundance of other, more abstract associations.
A second characteristic of metaphors is that the multiple ideas they present may initially seem contradictory, but they strangely make sense in specific situations. This is called a paradox. For example, the description of Katniss as “the girl on fire” carries contradictory associations. Fire is dangerous, just as the revolutionary ideas that Katniss inspires result in the deaths of many of Panem’s citizens, even many innocents. But fire is also life sustaining. Katniss’s fire sustains the hopes of Panem and kindles the people’s desire for a just society. In some ways, Katniss resembles the Greek Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and brought it to the human race. Prometheus is an ambiguous figure because his gift of fire sustains life and fuels the advance of civilization, but it can also be used as a weapon.
Paradoxical metaphors can be interpreted in different ways, so they can arouse different emotions in different people. Katniss as “the girl on fire” means something very different to Peeta Mellark than it means to President Snow. A metaphor’s meaning can also change in different contexts. As Katniss was entering the arena for the 74th Hunger Games, being called “the girl on fire” made her seem desirable and strong. However, the Capitol tried to co-opt this metaphor by sending a very real fire after her in the arena, attempting to make a joke of her and make her appear weak. At issue is what “the girl on fire” would bring to mind for the spectators of the Hunger Games. This fight over interpretations is similar to the ways in which candidates and satirists today parry back and forth over political slogans and branding. A favorable interpretation can engender support, whereas an unfavorable one can lead to defeat. Changing the interpretation of a metaphor can change people’s actions.
In philosophy, the study of interpretation is called hermeneutics. Hermeneutical philosophers believe that interpretation isn’t just the business of philosophers and literary critics; it’s part of everyone’s normal life. To be human is to “read,” or interpret, the events of our lives through the words and images we associate with them.2 But the interpretation of our lives is never simply a matter of discovering the meanings already present in events. Interpretation is always creative: by translating one idea into another, we create new meanings and are able to envision new possibilities.3
Hermeneutical philosophers believe it’s impossible to pin down one correct meaning of a word, a phrase, a metaphor, or a symbol, because meaning is created anew in the interactions of each speaker and listener or each reader and text. Hermeneutics is important in the Hunger Games trilogy, because the way in which Katniss and the people of Panem interpret their world gives them the power to change it. Because the metaphors and symbols they encounter are often paradoxical, interpreting them becomes a creative act.
The Reaping: Symbols That Create an Oppressive World
The government of Panem, centered at the Capitol, has established the Hunger Games ritual as a powerful symbol that defines the government’s relationship to the governed. We first see this in the opening scene of The Hunger Games, when the residents of District 12 must report for the reaping. All who can physically attend must be present, dressed in their finest. Hosted by the overexuberant Effie Trinket, the reaping looks outwardly like a celebration. Let’s apply a hermeneutic perspective to this situation and consider the significance of the words and images associated with the reaping.
One interpretation of the word reaping suggests a celebration of the harvest, when workers rejoice in the fruits of their labor. This reaping, however, is a celebration of the Capitol’s victory over its people and a reminder of the cost of rebellion in lives. It evokes an image of the Grim Reaper, cutting down youth in their prime. Reaping is a term the Capitol uses to make the murder of innocent young people seem as natural and necessary as a fall harvest. There’s a similar scene in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” in which all of the citizens of a small town gather each year for a ritual human sacrifice, the purpose of which is never explained. In The Hunger Games, however, the purpose of this ritual sacrifice is unmistakable: to demonstrate how powerless the people of Panem are.
In this dramatic scene in the public square, we learn that the youths who are chosen to fight are called tributes. Consider the history of this term. Tribute originally referred to a payment by a less powerful state to one of its more powerful neighbors. Rome, for example, collected tributes from its provinces and from nations it had conquered, using the money to build up an army that could then be used to conquer more territory and quell rebellions in territories that were already subjugated. Tribute is thus a paradoxical symbol. The Roman emperors viewed the payment of tributes as a sign of respect and a contribution to the well-being of the state, something between a gift and a tax. However, those forced to pay the tribute may very well have considered it as a weapon to ensure that they would forever be under the rule of Rome. After all, they were funding the same Roman armies that might be used to suppress an uprising!
In Panem, however, the government has already extracted as much money from the districts as it can. The coal miners of District 12 don’t get to keep their coal, the agricultural workers of Rue’s District 11 don’t get to keep their harvest, and the same applies to all of the other district residents and the products of their labor. All that’s left to take are their sons and daughters, along with their hopes and dreams. Although the term tribute may denote honor and respect in the Capitol, in the districts it stands for a theft of the future. As Katniss says,
Taking kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch—this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the message is clear, “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you.”4
Just as in the Roman Empire, if the oppressed people of Panem don’t pay their tributes, they will be wiped out. Thus, the metaphor of tribute has a history of oppression that the Capitol exaggerates to the extreme.
Preparation for the Arena: Theatrical Performance as a Weapon
In the Hunger Games, Katniss performs before an audience that wants to see carnage and that is excited to watch the tributes fight to the death. She needs to give the audience a reason to like her, in order to win sponsors and get their assistance in the arena. To do this, she must engage in a highly symbolic theatrical performance, an exercise in role-playing. From the start, a role that Katniss and Peeta play is that they are a united team: Cinna rolls them out holding hands in identical costumes.
For the Hunger Games spectators, the presentation of Peeta and Katniss as a team is paradoxical because the rules of the Games dictate that they’ll be battling each other. To present them as a team is to present them as something they’re not, a small sign of opposition to the Games and its paranoid logic. Moreover, what begins as a mere performance will, through creative interpretation, eventually become the literal truth.
Peeta professes his love for Katniss during his interview, further uniting the two competitors in the audience’s mind and marking the beginning of a compelling story. In so doing, Peeta defines Katniss for the audience, although it’s a definition that she resists. “He made me look weak!” she protests to Haymitch Abernathy after Peeta declares his love.
“He made you look desirable! And let’s face it, you need all the help you can get in that department. You were about as romantic as dirt until he said he wanted you. Now they all do. You’re all they’re talking about. The star-crossed lovers from District 12!” says Haymitch.
“But we’re not star-crossed lovers!” I say.
Haymitch grabs my shoulders and pins me against the wall. “Who cares? It’s all a big show. It’s all how you’re perceived.”5
The power of perception is hermeneutical. And as with any act of interpretation, the audience’s perceptions can influence the real outcomes.
What begins as figurative can become literal. For Katniss, what starts as a performance begins to shape her reality as her perception changes. She does care about Peeta and his survival. The words and images she uses become real and true, powerful statements of rebellion against the competitive, everyone-for-oneself paranoia mandated by the Capitol. Throughout the Games, this portrayal of unity will help Katniss to shift her attention from her fear that Peeta is scheming to kill her to their shared determination to outwit the Capitol.
The Arena and the Careers: Metaphors in a Manufactured World
To the people of Panem, the arena itself is a symbol that represents the Capitol’s ability to control them and its commitment to doing so. What the Capitol has done in the arena, it aspires to do and can threaten to do elsewhere. The Capitol has established total surveillance in the arena and nearly total surveillance in the districts, although in District 12 there are still areas like the woods where it can be evaded. Surveillance not only limits freedom but also threatens life. This is conveyed in the metaphor Katniss uses to describe the cameras at the reaping: they were, she says, “perched like buzzards.”6 Surveillance is associated with death, with scavengers who feed off death in the way that the Capitol feeds off the misery of its people.
Katniss’s description of the Careers is another rich metaphor with multiple associations: they are the Capitol’s “lapdogs.”7 Lapdogs are usually thought to be pampered and spoiled. They follow the orders of their masters unquestioningly, and some are trained to kill intruders. So this metaphor describes the Careers as bestial, spoiled, and unquestioningly obedient. For the Careers, killing is not merely a matter of survival—it’s a noble thing. It’s even enjoyable, as we see when Clove, a Career tribute, corners Katniss and taunts her, displaying a grim enjoyment of her suffering and relishing her temporary position of superiority: “I promised Cato if he’d let me have you, I’d give the audience a good show.”8
Katniss in the Arena: Paradox and Change
Metaphors and symbols are excellent at conveying complexity, which is why they’re often used to describe abstract, multifaceted concepts as well as that most complex of creatures, the human being. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss is the central and perhaps the most complex character. She’s a character of paradox and change. Consider the multiple roles she must play to survive in the arena of the 74th Hunger Games. Like metaphors, these roles each have a grain of truth, and yet each is only a partial representation of who she is.
One of the first metaphors Katniss uses to describe herself is squirrel. Her first hours in the arena are spent fleeing the battle and scavenging for food, pursued by Cato, Glimmer, and the Careers. Climbing a tree to escape them, she recalls how “Gale always says I remind him of a squirrel the way I can scurry up even the slenderest limbs.”9 Not only is Katniss as nimble as a squirrel, she’s also an evasive prey when chased.
A change is coming, though. Before long, Katniss finds herself chased by a pack of Careers while fighting hallucinations and panic caused by tracker jacker venom, which attacks both the body and the mind. She’s claimed the bow and arrows from Glimmer’s dead body, but she’s so weak that she’s ready to give up as the Careers close in. She’s shocked when Peeta shows up and, instead of killing her as she expected, saves her life.
Peeta helps Katniss to save herself. She now views herself not as prey but as a hunter who can defend herself, using violence if necessary. She says, “The weapons give me an entirely new perspective on the Games. I know I have tough opponents left to face. But I am no longer merely prey that runs and hides or takes desperate measures. If Cato broke through the trees right now, I wouldn’t flee, I’d shoot. I find I’m actually anticipating that moment with pleasure.”10
The way Peeta helps Katniss to make the transition from prey to hunter parallels the way he helped her to transition from a down-and-out trash-bin scavenger to a capable provider back in District 12, when she was starving and he threw her two burned loaves of bread. His kindness contributes to her ability to find her own inner strength, gives her hope, and helps her to reinterpret her identity.
Later, the Games and her debt to Peeta lead her to take on a new and unfamiliar role as a caregiver for Peeta after he’s been attacked. “Ironically, at this point in the Games, my little sister would be of far more use to Peeta than I am,” she muses.11 As a healer, Katniss may not have her sister’s aptitude, but her efforts honor those who do not fight as well as she does, like Rue and Prim, whose strength is in making peace and giving life. Katniss fights to protect the healers, because she admires them and realizes they’re strong in their ability to heal but defenseless in the face of extreme violence.
Finally, Katniss takes on the role of a trickster in the Games, pretending to be in love with Peeta and wiping away an imaginary tear. She also proves herself to be a gifted dramatist in the final scene of the Games, forcing the Capitol’s hand with her suicide attempt. Her “little trick with berries,” as President Snow describes it, is a prime example of how her hermeneutical power, her ability to reinterpret the meaning of things, helps to save her.12 Katniss sees that the berries can kill, but she also sees that they can keep her alive. They’re poisonous yet life-giving. Her theatrical performance forces an impossible dilemma on the Capitol: regardless of whether the Capitol permits Katniss and Peeta to carry out the mutual suicide she has staged, regardless of whether they live or die, they have denied the Capitol its victory. Katniss’s hermeneutical skill in discerning the potential dramatic meaning of those berries gives her the power to redefine the rules of the world the Capitol has created for her.
Katniss herself is a paradox: killer and healer, hunter and prey. Being multifaceted makes her flexible enough to deal with the challenges of a reality that’s constantly being manipulated by her enemies. Katniss must continually reinterpret who she is and discover anew what she’s capable of doing. With each new role she takes on, she learns new truths about herself. The contradictory aspects of her personality reveal her to be a complex person capable of meeting the demands of her life. Her ability to take on multiple roles also endears her to the audience of the Hunger Games. She shows that she’s focused not only on killing, like Cato and Clove, but also on protecting those she cares about. For the spectators, Katniss and Peeta have created a new story. It’s a story about surviving, but more important, surviving with your compassion and dignity intact. This creative new message resonates across Panem.
The Metaphor of the Mockingjay
The Mockingjay is the central metaphor in the Hunger Games trilogy. It begins as just a token to remind Katniss of her district, but it gathers meaning as the story progresses, especially after the 74th Hunger Games. While the Mockingjay role is originally thrust upon Katniss unwanted, it eventually becomes a metaphor she accepts and even internalizes, for the sake of Panem and the rebellion.
The mockingjay has paradoxical associations. It’s the product of crossbreeding between mockingbirds and jabberjays, the latter being birds created to spy on the rebels and report back to the Capitol. Thus, mockingjays owe their existence to the Capitol’s attempt to create a weapon against the people of Panem, a weapon that backfired because the people being spied on intentionally fed false messages to the jabberjays.
From Rue, we learn more about mockingjays. In the orchards of her home district, Rue relies on mockingjays to carry messages to other workers—messages of hope, announcing that the workday is over. But she also warns that mockingjays, though songbirds, are “nasty if you come near their nests.”13 The mockingjay metaphor describes Katniss to a tee. She’s a messenger, a symbol of hope. Yet she’s also a fighter, battling at first to protect the ones she loves but ultimately to protect all of the innocents and the future generations of Panem.
Like the jabberjay, Katniss the Mockingjay is originally created as an ideological weapon, but unlike the jabberjay, she’s a weapon of the rebellion against the Capitol. Initially, this is not by choice. She didn’t choose to be rescued from the Games instead of Peeta. She doesn’t even recognize the significance of the mockingjay on Plutarch’s watch. At the outset of Catching Fire, she’s fighting only for the people closest to her, whom she can save only by convincing President Snow that she’s not a symbol of the rebellion. But even making simple connections with her family and friends is seen as defiance. Expressing her gratitude to the people of District 11 is enough to ignite a rebellious demonstration. Allegiance to or friendship with anyone but the Capitol has become an act of defiance.
By the time that the 75th Hunger Games demands her return to the arena, Katniss realizes she can no longer please President Snow. She has just returned from her Victory Tour, where her sole purpose was to convince Snow that she was no threat to him. She sees, however, that she has failed, for two reasons. First, any act of kindness—indeed, any human connection she makes with another citizen of Panem—is seen as defiance. Second, against her wishes, the people of Panem have already begun to embrace her as a symbol of revolution. Realizing that she can’t please Snow while also remaining true to her friends and family, she makes a deliberate choice to act as a symbol for the rebellion. Called before the Gamemakers, she shows her defiance by hanging an effigy of former Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane. In due course, she becomes a soldier, a weapon against the Capitol, and the centerpiece of a series of propos that urge the districts to rise up against the Capitol. A mockingjay will fight to protect its nest, and at this point Katniss’s nest has expanded to include not just her family and friends, or even just the people in her district, but all of the innocents of Panem.
Meanwhile, the Capitol attempts to co-opt the mockingjay symbol, just as it had tried to co-opt the “girl on fire” metaphor by sending a wildfire after Katniss in the arena. The Capitol portrays Katniss as the cause of the violence, convincing one very important person—Peeta—to accept that interpretation. In Mockingjay, the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy, Peeta is hijacked and sees Katniss only as a threat. He shouts, “She’s some kind of mutt the Capitol created to use against the rest of us!”14 In the battle of metaphors, the Capitol has won this round. The mockingjay was a kind of a mutt, and the Capitol has convinced Peeta that Katniss is that sort of beast.
Katniss is beset from two sides. Not only has President Snow sent every deadly creation he has in pursuit of her, she also learns a terrible secret about the leaders of the revolution. Snow reveals the truth to her about the bombing raid that killed Capitol children along with her own sister, whom she had fought so hard to protect:
“So wasteful, so unnecessary. Anyone could see the game was over by that point. In fact, I was just about to issue an official surrender when they released those parachutes. . . . Well, you really didn’t think I gave the order, did you? Forget the obvious fact that if I’d had a working hovercraft at my disposal, I’d be using it to make my escape. But aside from that, what purpose would it have served? We both know I’m not above killing children, but I’m not wasteful.”15
“Of course he’s lying,” Katniss thinks. “But there’s something struggling to free itself from the lie as well.”16 Katniss understands that even a man she has described as a deadly, deceptive snake may give her an element of truth that she can use to save lives. Her interpretation of his speech is a creative act. She doesn’t take him at his word, because she knows his intent is to defeat her, not save her. But at the same time she reaches a sort of understanding with him—a creative translation of what he said—that’s helpful to her cause.
In her assassination of President Coin, Katniss at last finds a Mockingjay identity that’s authentic, one with which she truly can identify. She realizes that she’s been used as a weapon against the innocent people of Panem to maintain Coin’s power and that her metaphor has been co-opted and stolen. But in her final act of violence, Katniss wins the fight for the meaning of her metaphor—and discovers truth in the paradox. She’s not a weapon to be used by others; she’s a fighter and a messenger on her own terms.
In perhaps less dramatic but no less significant ways, we all negotiate paradoxical metaphors, symbols, and roles every day of our lives. We balance the expectations of friends, lovers, coworkers, and others, each of whom defines us in a different way: mother, daughter, lover, boss. For each of us, these roles are literal but also metaphorical because we can’t be just one thing. As human beings, we’re all webs of paradoxical interpretations. Like Katniss, our job is to examine the ways we define ourselves and interpret our roles in ways that are powerful and authentic.
NOTES
1. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008), 15.
2. Deborah Kerdeman, “Hermeneutics and Education: Understanding, Control, and Agency,” Educational Theory 48, no. 2 (1998), 241–266.
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is credited as one of the most important philosophers to have developed hermeneutics into a tool of philosophy. The “truth” of hermeneutics, he wrote, “is that of translation. It is higher because it allows the foreign to become one’s own, not by destroying it critically or reproducing it uncritically but by explicating it with one’s own horizons with one’s own concepts and thus giving it new validity.” David E. Linge, ed., Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 94.
4. Collins, The Hunger Games, 18–19.
5. Ibid., 135.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Ibid., 161.
8. Ibid., 285.
9. Ibid., 187.
10. Ibid., 197.
11. Ibid., 256.
12. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic Press, 2009), 21.
13. Collins, The Hunger Games, 212.
14. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic Press, 2010), 190.
15. Ibid., 356.
16. Ibid., 356–357.