The Girl Who Was on Fire Read Free

The reality of Gale—that he is so capable of hate and violence, that he is ultimately unable to protect Katniss’ family—is the major problem between the two. Katniss’ illusions about Gale—her thinking that he does not mean what he says—helps Gale’s cause romantically. Likewise with the audience. Gale has very limited page time in the first two books, but he is a literary archetype. The tall, dark, and handsome, aloof and mysterious boy who really connects with you even though all the ladies want him is a very appealing type. The figure of the “baker,” blond, sweet Peeta, is much less intrinsically alluring than the figure of the “hunter.”
Gale’s surface makes him extremely popular with readers, but the whole point of the Hunger Games is all the things going on beneath the surface.
    It is an interesting juxtaposition, because if the problem between Katniss and Gale is reality, the problem between Katniss and Peeta is always illusion. Peeta is deceived by Katniss’ feigned love in The Hunger Games , both are forced into play-acting in Catching Fire , and in Mockingjay Peeta’s mental torture has had such an effect on him that he can no longer tell the difference between reality and illusion, between Katniss who he loves and his most deadly enemy. The other characters have to supply answers to Peeta’s constant refrain of “Real or not real?” throughout Mockingjay . He cannot entirely trust their answers, and yet he has to because he cannot rely on his own perception. His position is horrifying, and yet it is just a magnified version of everyone’s position in the Hunger Games—of our own positions as consumers of entertainment that pretends to reflect reality. The refrain “Real or not real?” is a simply a vocalization of the ultimate question of the Hunger Games, and it is a question without any definite answer.
    War ends up having the same layers of deceit as the Hunger Games does. Early in Mockingjay the characters all come to the conclusion that Katniss is only convincing as a spokesperson when she herself is convinced by the situation: when it is real to her. So the rebellion has to set evocative scenes for Katniss, just as Snow and the Capitol do in the previous two books. Propaganda in war is even more important than in entertainment, and so the war we have known must happen from the start of the Hunger Games—a war to change this unbearable society—is portrayed as manufactured killing, as just another Hunger Games, and not much more real.
    We never really do get a face for the antagonist: the closest we
come is Snow, and not only does Katniss explicitly reject the chance to kill him, but his death is quite flippantly accomplished and dismissed by the narrative: “Opinions differ on whether he choked to death by laughing or was crushed by the crowd. No one really cares” ( Mockingjay ). There is no easy way to defeat the evil in the world of the Hunger Games. It is the evil inherent in all of us, and even at the end it is by no means certain that all the evil we have been shown will not spring up again. After all, as Plutarch tells Katniss, “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction” ( Mockingjay ).
    Katniss has a gift for destruction of both herself and others, which she realizes in Mockingjay makes her very like Gale. And yet she makes the decision not to be like Gale—not to kill Snow but to take out Coin, to eliminate the threat of violence in the future, rather than take revenge for violence in the past.
    She also realizes that what she needs is someone who helps her be her better self, rather than someone who reflects her worst self: the guy less like her is actually the guy who’s best for her. To a degree, Gale decides the issue for her: not that he doesn’t love her, but that his actions in the war mean she will never be able to disassociate him from her sister’s death. Fans of both boys can be happy, in that Gale is