Katniss Everdeen, and Character Strength from Unexpected Sources
The promised essay for womenlovefest. Some of this is taken from comments I made at Mark Reads; a lot of it is new. HUGE GIANT SPOILERS for Mockingjay, so be warned.
Katniss Everdeen, and Character Strength from Unexpected Sources
by Puel
Katniss Everdeen is not the easiest character to like. She's distrustful, judgmental, and prickly; she reacts to kindness with hostility a lot of the time; she's terrible at understanding other peoples' feelings. Some readers extrapolate from those traits and think Katniss is practically a sociopath. And enough readers who liked her in The Hunger Games, or in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, thought she completely fell apart in Mockingjay; here's a tough and capable female character, they say, and by the end of Mockingjay she's a psychological wreck who isn't able to decide anything for herself.
It's easy to see Katniss's survival skills and combat prowess and toughness and think that's all that counts as strength where she's concerned. But doing so does a disservice to her other strengths, and some of her most significant moments of character growth. Katniss's real strength isn't about being a kickass revolutionary leader or the toughest kid on the playground. It's about how she develops her capacity for empathy, and how that leads her to choose her own path rather than accept the one that's been laid out for her. It's about the moments where she acts with awareness of the other people around her, rather than react to personal hurts and dangers.
Collins is good at setting up what we think are going to be epic showdowns and climactic battles and subverting those expectations entirely to point out who the real enemy is. In The Hunger Games, we're all rooting for Katniss's showdown with Cato, and then he gets mauled to death by mutts and Katniss mercy-kills him, because in the end they're both victims of the Capitol's oppression. In Catching Fire, we expect a clash between Brutus and Enobaria and Katniss's team, at the very least, and then Katniss realizes -- again -- that her enemies aren't the people in the arena but the people who've forced her and everyone else into it. In Mockingjay, we're set up to expect a showdown to end all showdowns with Katniss and Snow, but that wouldn't have confronted the real problem: atrocities have been committed on both sides of this war, and both Snow and Coin need to be held accountable for the things they've done.
Katniss's gestures, when you think about them, are never anything as grand as leading an army. A fistful of berries. Two arrows, one aimed at a tiny patch in a force field and one aimed at the right person. But they're all such clear markers of her defiance, of her refusal to play by the rules that have been set out for her, of her reclaiming her agency and taking a third option when she seems to be faced with nothing but awful choices. And I think that's even more satisfying than the showdowns, because in those showdowns, she's still playing within the system that's been set in place, and confronting the enemies that have been scripted for her. In all three books, Katniss manages to directly attack not her immediate enemies, but the very structure that's oppressing her.
Katniss's revolution is, I think, more about personal change than societal change, about acting instead of reacting, about finding hope and love when all possibility for it seems to be extinguished. Those moments show her character growth the most, and those moments are what have broader social repercussions-not the kickass battle scenes, but her acts of compassion and sacrifice. Katniss's love for her sister, and her decision to volunteer in Prim's stead, prompts the first revolutionary action in the series:
At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lifts and holds it out to me…It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love.
The residents of District 12 treat her sacrifice not as spectacle, but as a gesture worthy of respect. The trend continues: Katniss loves Rue and won't let her be treated as another piece in the Games, so she wreathes Rue's body in flowers and gains the support of District 11. The love story that plays out between her and Peeta is what captures the audience, not Katniss's marksmanship, and we can play the real-not real game with that narrative a lot, but she pulls out the berries because she can't let him die. By the time Catching Fire rolls around, she isn't even trying to preserve her own life in the Quarter Quell; she's trying to keep Peeta alive. And in Mockingjay, she risks her own safety numerous times, despite the protests of her handlers in District 13, for the sake of people she doesn't know.
All of this isn't to suggest that Katniss is an altruist, or even close to selfless. She's not. Even when she starts empathizing a little more, it's empathy for people she's gotten close to: Haymitch, Cinna, her prep team, her mother, Peeta, and when Mockingjay rolls around, some of the other surviving victors. When she reaches out to strangers, it's often because she recognizes something of herself in them-the bombing of the Nut reminds her of the mine collapse where her father died, for example. Still, it's different from where she started: from loathing her prep team to recognizing that they're products of their environment as much as she is (though she still gets annoyed with them), from treating her mother with contempt to trying to mend their relationship, from preparing to kill the other victors to counting some of them as her friends and confidantes.
Let's look at Mockingjay some more. Over the course of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Katniss has been through a fuck of a lot, to say the least. In Mockingjay, Katniss loses her home, many of the people in it, much of her freedom (although it's not like Katniss ever had much of that, really), Peeta's love (for a while), Gale's companionship, a number of her allies and friends, and her little sister-the little sister she sacrificed herself for in the first place. Is all of that unnecessarily cruel on Collins's part? Maybe. But here's the thing: Katniss doesn't give up. She becomes the Mockingjay-but on the terms she sets, not on Coin's. She insists on the humane treatment of her prep team, the prep team she started the series hating. She shoots down a hovercraft, even though she's under orders to retreat. She makes the rebels stop firing at the soldiers emerging from the Nut, and appeals to them as a miner's daughter. She recognizes she has something in common with them, and that killing people who also have suffered at the hands of the Capitol isn't the way to win the battle. She insists on going to the Capitol, and (after a kick in the ass from Haymitch) helps Peeta try to sort out what is and isn't real while they're there. She leads her band of rebels through the Capitol even after the deaths of half the squad, even though she's exhausted and terrified and trapped, she accepts responsibility for the people who she's led to their deaths and goes forward with her plan, instead of letting guilt paralyze her. After Prim's death, Katniss is utterly shattered, but realizes that Prim's loss doesn't mean other children should be sacrificed and kills Coin to make sure no Games ever happen again. When she's imprisoned for Coin's murder, she sings, and vows never to let anyone use her as a figurehead again.
Yes, Katniss loses almost everything, and yes, her actions don't always succeed. But she doesn't stop trying, and she tries to take as much control of her circumstances as a teenage tribute-turned-soldier-and-revolutionary-symbol can. So much of being a symbol is about the meanings others project onto you, not the ones you make for yourself, and that makes Katniss's attempts not to fall victim to that all the more indicative of her strength.
And it's worth noting that when Katniss shows this kind of resilience, when she refuses to play by other peoples' rules, other people follow. Gale backs her up, and Coin agrees to Katniss's terms. The prep team is released. The workers from the Nut turn on the Capitol's soldiers after Katniss is shot. Peeta regains his sense of self, slowly, and manages to stave off one of his attacks with Katniss's help. In Tigris's shop, Gale and Peeta tell Katniss that they still believe in her. Haymitch, who said "This is why we don't let you make the plans" to Katniss at the end of Catching Fire, cedes leadership to her when he says "I'm with the Mockingjay," and trusts her to do what she has to. Even Plutarch, cynical as he is, wonders if this might actually be the time when peace sticks. Yes, Katniss has an effect on other people, and even if she's not too great at understanding what she makes other people feel, she's increasingly willing to think of others, and even to put their survival ahead of her own safety. She's never going to be the most trusting or compassionate person around, no, but considering where she started, it's a big shift.
This is why I think that Mockingjay is, though brutal and uncompromising and ungodly depressing, ultimately a testament to endurance and survival and even hope. It's a look at the devastation of war, yes, and how war is anything but entertainment, and how using violence to settle our differences wreaks havoc on our children. It hits those points a lot harder than the previous two books, and in the overwhelming devastation the events of Mockingjay leave behind it's hard to pick out spots of hope, but they're there. We see the pain all the characters endured and see that no, it never goes away entirely - but we also see that there's the possibility of life beyond that. Even after so much has been lost, things can grow again.
I love the dandelion in the spring passage so freaking much, because for me, it encapsulates that. Heavy-handed? Maybe, but it illustrates why the whole Team Peeta versus Team Gale thing misses the point. It's never really been about the boys; it's about the worldview Katniss wants to adopt, and how she wants to conduct the revolution and her life. Katniss sees the kind of destruction wrought by the anger and self-interest and violent retaliation (and yes, pain) that Gale embodies. Heck, that's where she starts at the beginning of the series, and understandably so. But she grows past that over the course of the books, learns to recognize and validate the pain of others, and decides that rebuilding is more important than retaliation. (That's one of the places where I can most clearly see how Collins was inspired by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think it's an immensely valuable thing for younger readers to think about, given the way so much of the media glorifies retaliation and revenge.)
No, Katniss isn't going to be the same. But her life still has meaning, and she's finding ways to connect to Peeta and other people around her even when it's damn difficult and doesn't always work, and she hasn't given up, and that is one of the most uplifting statements you can make, I think. Recovery is a neverending process, and there isn't an endpoint after which everything becomes magically okay, but it's a struggle and a journey worth engaging in, and sometimes the most important thing isn't the progress you've made but the fact that you're trying to move forward at all. That's Katniss's real strength over the course of the series-and it's a testament to her growth as a character that she's able to develop enough empathy to see rebuilding as a possibility.
Let's go back to those earlier two criticisms of Katniss: either she's an emotionless murderous sociopath, or she becomes weak and whiny and too passive over the course of the series. I've tried to demonstrate above why I think neither of these are true, but to recap: Katniss isn't winning any empathy awards but she grows a lot and her most significant actions in the series are fueled by the moments where she expresses solidarity, and Katniss manages to pull off a hell of a lot given the constraints she's acting under and her mental state. (I take a lot of issue with the idea that Katniss's trauma somehow deprives her of strength or agency, because to me, the fact that she's able to get out of bed after all the shit that's happened to her speaks volumes. And she does a lot more than just get out of bed.) Katniss Everdeen is far from perfect. She makes a lot of mistakes and hurts a lot of people and gets badly damaged by her experiences. But she stands up to a lot, too, and I ultimately find her arc incredibly powerful and compelling and even empowering.
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Katniss Everdeen, and Character Strength from Unexpected Sources
by Puel
Katniss Everdeen is not the easiest character to like. She's distrustful, judgmental, and prickly; she reacts to kindness with hostility a lot of the time; she's terrible at understanding other peoples' feelings. Some readers extrapolate from those traits and think Katniss is practically a sociopath. And enough readers who liked her in The Hunger Games, or in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, thought she completely fell apart in Mockingjay; here's a tough and capable female character, they say, and by the end of Mockingjay she's a psychological wreck who isn't able to decide anything for herself.
It's easy to see Katniss's survival skills and combat prowess and toughness and think that's all that counts as strength where she's concerned. But doing so does a disservice to her other strengths, and some of her most significant moments of character growth. Katniss's real strength isn't about being a kickass revolutionary leader or the toughest kid on the playground. It's about how she develops her capacity for empathy, and how that leads her to choose her own path rather than accept the one that's been laid out for her. It's about the moments where she acts with awareness of the other people around her, rather than react to personal hurts and dangers.
Collins is good at setting up what we think are going to be epic showdowns and climactic battles and subverting those expectations entirely to point out who the real enemy is. In The Hunger Games, we're all rooting for Katniss's showdown with Cato, and then he gets mauled to death by mutts and Katniss mercy-kills him, because in the end they're both victims of the Capitol's oppression. In Catching Fire, we expect a clash between Brutus and Enobaria and Katniss's team, at the very least, and then Katniss realizes -- again -- that her enemies aren't the people in the arena but the people who've forced her and everyone else into it. In Mockingjay, we're set up to expect a showdown to end all showdowns with Katniss and Snow, but that wouldn't have confronted the real problem: atrocities have been committed on both sides of this war, and both Snow and Coin need to be held accountable for the things they've done.
Katniss's gestures, when you think about them, are never anything as grand as leading an army. A fistful of berries. Two arrows, one aimed at a tiny patch in a force field and one aimed at the right person. But they're all such clear markers of her defiance, of her refusal to play by the rules that have been set out for her, of her reclaiming her agency and taking a third option when she seems to be faced with nothing but awful choices. And I think that's even more satisfying than the showdowns, because in those showdowns, she's still playing within the system that's been set in place, and confronting the enemies that have been scripted for her. In all three books, Katniss manages to directly attack not her immediate enemies, but the very structure that's oppressing her.
Katniss's revolution is, I think, more about personal change than societal change, about acting instead of reacting, about finding hope and love when all possibility for it seems to be extinguished. Those moments show her character growth the most, and those moments are what have broader social repercussions-not the kickass battle scenes, but her acts of compassion and sacrifice. Katniss's love for her sister, and her decision to volunteer in Prim's stead, prompts the first revolutionary action in the series:
At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lifts and holds it out to me…It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love.
The residents of District 12 treat her sacrifice not as spectacle, but as a gesture worthy of respect. The trend continues: Katniss loves Rue and won't let her be treated as another piece in the Games, so she wreathes Rue's body in flowers and gains the support of District 11. The love story that plays out between her and Peeta is what captures the audience, not Katniss's marksmanship, and we can play the real-not real game with that narrative a lot, but she pulls out the berries because she can't let him die. By the time Catching Fire rolls around, she isn't even trying to preserve her own life in the Quarter Quell; she's trying to keep Peeta alive. And in Mockingjay, she risks her own safety numerous times, despite the protests of her handlers in District 13, for the sake of people she doesn't know.
All of this isn't to suggest that Katniss is an altruist, or even close to selfless. She's not. Even when she starts empathizing a little more, it's empathy for people she's gotten close to: Haymitch, Cinna, her prep team, her mother, Peeta, and when Mockingjay rolls around, some of the other surviving victors. When she reaches out to strangers, it's often because she recognizes something of herself in them-the bombing of the Nut reminds her of the mine collapse where her father died, for example. Still, it's different from where she started: from loathing her prep team to recognizing that they're products of their environment as much as she is (though she still gets annoyed with them), from treating her mother with contempt to trying to mend their relationship, from preparing to kill the other victors to counting some of them as her friends and confidantes.
Let's look at Mockingjay some more. Over the course of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Katniss has been through a fuck of a lot, to say the least. In Mockingjay, Katniss loses her home, many of the people in it, much of her freedom (although it's not like Katniss ever had much of that, really), Peeta's love (for a while), Gale's companionship, a number of her allies and friends, and her little sister-the little sister she sacrificed herself for in the first place. Is all of that unnecessarily cruel on Collins's part? Maybe. But here's the thing: Katniss doesn't give up. She becomes the Mockingjay-but on the terms she sets, not on Coin's. She insists on the humane treatment of her prep team, the prep team she started the series hating. She shoots down a hovercraft, even though she's under orders to retreat. She makes the rebels stop firing at the soldiers emerging from the Nut, and appeals to them as a miner's daughter. She recognizes she has something in common with them, and that killing people who also have suffered at the hands of the Capitol isn't the way to win the battle. She insists on going to the Capitol, and (after a kick in the ass from Haymitch) helps Peeta try to sort out what is and isn't real while they're there. She leads her band of rebels through the Capitol even after the deaths of half the squad, even though she's exhausted and terrified and trapped, she accepts responsibility for the people who she's led to their deaths and goes forward with her plan, instead of letting guilt paralyze her. After Prim's death, Katniss is utterly shattered, but realizes that Prim's loss doesn't mean other children should be sacrificed and kills Coin to make sure no Games ever happen again. When she's imprisoned for Coin's murder, she sings, and vows never to let anyone use her as a figurehead again.
Yes, Katniss loses almost everything, and yes, her actions don't always succeed. But she doesn't stop trying, and she tries to take as much control of her circumstances as a teenage tribute-turned-soldier-and-revolutionary-symbol can. So much of being a symbol is about the meanings others project onto you, not the ones you make for yourself, and that makes Katniss's attempts not to fall victim to that all the more indicative of her strength.
And it's worth noting that when Katniss shows this kind of resilience, when she refuses to play by other peoples' rules, other people follow. Gale backs her up, and Coin agrees to Katniss's terms. The prep team is released. The workers from the Nut turn on the Capitol's soldiers after Katniss is shot. Peeta regains his sense of self, slowly, and manages to stave off one of his attacks with Katniss's help. In Tigris's shop, Gale and Peeta tell Katniss that they still believe in her. Haymitch, who said "This is why we don't let you make the plans" to Katniss at the end of Catching Fire, cedes leadership to her when he says "I'm with the Mockingjay," and trusts her to do what she has to. Even Plutarch, cynical as he is, wonders if this might actually be the time when peace sticks. Yes, Katniss has an effect on other people, and even if she's not too great at understanding what she makes other people feel, she's increasingly willing to think of others, and even to put their survival ahead of her own safety. She's never going to be the most trusting or compassionate person around, no, but considering where she started, it's a big shift.
This is why I think that Mockingjay is, though brutal and uncompromising and ungodly depressing, ultimately a testament to endurance and survival and even hope. It's a look at the devastation of war, yes, and how war is anything but entertainment, and how using violence to settle our differences wreaks havoc on our children. It hits those points a lot harder than the previous two books, and in the overwhelming devastation the events of Mockingjay leave behind it's hard to pick out spots of hope, but they're there. We see the pain all the characters endured and see that no, it never goes away entirely - but we also see that there's the possibility of life beyond that. Even after so much has been lost, things can grow again.
I love the dandelion in the spring passage so freaking much, because for me, it encapsulates that. Heavy-handed? Maybe, but it illustrates why the whole Team Peeta versus Team Gale thing misses the point. It's never really been about the boys; it's about the worldview Katniss wants to adopt, and how she wants to conduct the revolution and her life. Katniss sees the kind of destruction wrought by the anger and self-interest and violent retaliation (and yes, pain) that Gale embodies. Heck, that's where she starts at the beginning of the series, and understandably so. But she grows past that over the course of the books, learns to recognize and validate the pain of others, and decides that rebuilding is more important than retaliation. (That's one of the places where I can most clearly see how Collins was inspired by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think it's an immensely valuable thing for younger readers to think about, given the way so much of the media glorifies retaliation and revenge.)
No, Katniss isn't going to be the same. But her life still has meaning, and she's finding ways to connect to Peeta and other people around her even when it's damn difficult and doesn't always work, and she hasn't given up, and that is one of the most uplifting statements you can make, I think. Recovery is a neverending process, and there isn't an endpoint after which everything becomes magically okay, but it's a struggle and a journey worth engaging in, and sometimes the most important thing isn't the progress you've made but the fact that you're trying to move forward at all. That's Katniss's real strength over the course of the series-and it's a testament to her growth as a character that she's able to develop enough empathy to see rebuilding as a possibility.
Let's go back to those earlier two criticisms of Katniss: either she's an emotionless murderous sociopath, or she becomes weak and whiny and too passive over the course of the series. I've tried to demonstrate above why I think neither of these are true, but to recap: Katniss isn't winning any empathy awards but she grows a lot and her most significant actions in the series are fueled by the moments where she expresses solidarity, and Katniss manages to pull off a hell of a lot given the constraints she's acting under and her mental state. (I take a lot of issue with the idea that Katniss's trauma somehow deprives her of strength or agency, because to me, the fact that she's able to get out of bed after all the shit that's happened to her speaks volumes. And she does a lot more than just get out of bed.) Katniss Everdeen is far from perfect. She makes a lot of mistakes and hurts a lot of people and gets badly damaged by her experiences. But she stands up to a lot, too, and I ultimately find her arc incredibly powerful and compelling and even empowering.
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