Search Results for: Hunger Games

Or was this session with Caesar Flickerman and the Celebrity Careers required viewing in Panem?

Please note this thread and post were started in August, 2010, when Mockingjay was published. For a look at Hogwarts Professor articles that discuss the whole series at length go here and for discussion leading up to and about the Lionsgate film go here. Be fore-warned: Writing on this two year old thread or any of the ‘Mockingjay Discussion’ Points will not be seen by many readers.

The Peeta story arc took a dramatic turn in Mockingjay as Ms. Collins revealed Mr. Mellark as less the Christ figure of unconditional love on whom Katniss depends (see chapter 14, p. 195) than a shattered post-traumatic shock survivor that has been used and abused by equally brutal partisans in the Panem war. That we get a “happy ending” (?) with Peeta and Katniss raising a family in District 12 is not cause of celebration but for agonizing reflection about the broken lives wars leave in their wake, most obviously in the lives of the surviving soldiers.

My question for discussion is what do you think of the several Peetas we see in Mockingjay — the heroic resistor of his hijacking that saves District 13, the mutt-tation Peeta that is rescued, the recovering Peeta who with Katniss becomes a fire-mutt phoenix at the war’s end? Is his chrysalis and transformation under torture and during his struggle to regain his memory allegorical? Political commentary? Or is he a Christ figure?

Ms. Collins closes Mockingjay with these notes that suggest he is (chapter 27, p. 380):

What I need [to survive] is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.

Your thoughts?

I laid out an involved theory about how the Mockingjay Rebellion was set-up by Haymitch and companythat I called the Pearl Plot. Mockingjay didn’t tell us very much about the pin, whether Katniss Everdeen was chosen deliberately by the revolutionaries, or how the organization of the rebellion worked under District 13 direction. Ms. Collins left these details to our imagination while making it very clear that the technocrats living in their sterile underground bunkers in District 13 were definitely in charge.

Were you disappointed or relieved that there wasn’t more explanation or back-story for the mysteries set-up in the first two books of the trilogy?