Katniss isn’t the mockingjay… but her children are
I don’t mean to insinuate that Katniss isn’t the central character of The Hunger Games series or that she isn’t the catalyst for a revolution or the symbol of rebellion to her people. She is all of those things and more. She is cast by the rebellion as the Mockingjay, and she comes to identify as that role, albeit reluctantly. I would argue, though, that she just isn’t the mockingjay. There’s a qualitative difference between the two. One capital letter can make a world of difference. So let’s talk more about that little “m.”
The Hunger Games is, among other things, a treatise on how we, as a society, care (or don’t) for our children. It’s a pacifist call to stop using our children in the theater of war. This is corroborated when Katniss thinks, “[S]omething is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children to settle its differences.” She even comes to embrace what Peeta cautioned against in his first Capitol interview, that humans as she knows them ought to die off so that “some decent species [can] take over.” (MJ 377)
This new species of human is the mockingjay.
Suzanne Collins goes through great pains to relay a few basic truths to the reader from the outset of The Hunger Games:
Katniss is a “mini me” version of her deceased father. Whereas her mother and sister are delicate and fair like the merchant class, Katniss is Seam Strong: she’s not only darkly complected like her father, but she shares his rebellious and free spirit. There is nothing merchant class about Katniss. She is, to her core, Seam.
Katniss can’t bear the thought of having children in the world she knows. If it strikes you as odd that Suzanne Collins would have a 16-year-old girl talking about having (or not having) children within the first several pages of the series, then you’re onto something. This is an overarching theme and preoccupation, and it’s perhaps the most important one to Katniss as a character. Having, or not having children, is representative of Katniss’ future. By not wanting to have children, she is resisting the system in the only way she can as a disenfranchised person. It’s her way of opting out of the future altogether.
There is a specific mythology behind the mockingjay as a species, and Suzanne Collins wants us to get it exactly right. (we’ll talk about that more in a sec).
Why do these three points matter?
Let’s start with the mythology behind the mockingjay. Here’s what Collins tells us:
“They’re… something of a slap in the face to the Capitol. During the rebellion, the Capitol bred a series of genetically altered animals as weapons. The common term for them was muttations, or sometimes mutts for short. One was a special bird called a jabberjay that had the ability to memorize and repeat whole human conversations. They were homing birds, exclusively male, that were released into regions where the Capitol’s enemies were known to be hiding. After the birds gathered words, they’d fly back to centers to be recorded. It took people awhile to realize what was going on…Then, of course, the rebels fed the Capitol endless lies, and the joke was on it. So the centers were shut down and the birds were abandoned to die off in the wild.
Only they didn’t die off. Instead, the jabberjays mated with female mockingbirds, creating a whole new species that could replicate both bird whistles and human melodies.” (THG 42-43)
Apologies for the extended quote! But this is some heavy stuff… it’s the heart and soul of the series. The Capitol creates a weapon against its people, the male jabberjay, a bird excellent with words. Ultimately the jabberjay proves useless to the Capitol- worse than useless, even. Destructive. The rebels use it for their own cause. And then the jabberjay mates with the female mockingbird and creates a new species that should never have existed. Suzanne Collins might as well have put a “spoiler alert” before this paragraph. This foreshadows exactly what happens in the series. And she just told us on page 42. That saucy minx.
Katniss is the mockingbird. She isn’t a mutt of anything; she is purely her father, a product of the Seam. She is so “Seam” she is practically a monolith. As a child, she overhears her father singing and spouting anti-Capitol political rhetoric, and she replicates his call, getting scolded by her mother. (THG 6, MJ 123) When her father would sing, all the birds would stop to listen to him. And lo and behold!, the same is true of Katniss. (THG 301). Throughout the series, Katniss only ever sings the songs her father taught her, those she heard as a child. She doesn’t have a song of her own. The mockingbird, in literature, symbolizes innocence and purity. And, despite the countless horrible things Katniss thinks about herself, she is an innocent. She isn’t privy to the political machinations of the adults around her. She doesn’t even know the content of her own heart. She’s pure (but for Peeta she’s perfect).
….Which brings us to Peeta. He is the jabberjay. He is described by Katniss as being good with words more times than it’s useful to recount. One of my favorite examples is when Katniss thinks, “Peeta doesn’t need a brush to paint images… He works just as well in words” (MJ 22) In fact, following his first interview with Caesar Flickerman, she adds, “I don’t care [that he is a traitor]. Not what he says or who he says it for, only that he is still capable of speech.” (MJ 27) He is the voice of reason in her world, the leader she envisions in a just society. Just as Peeta hears her call and is “a goner,” so too is Katniss for him. They are two songbirds impossibly, irrevocably attracted to each other.
Peeta isn’t just a songbird, though. He is, specifically, the jabberjay. He is tortured by the Capitol, turned into an “evil-mutt version” of himself, and is sent to destroy Katniss and, therefore, the rebellion (MJ 243). When he is rescued and brought to District 13, the Capitol’s scheme has apparently worked. He tries to kill her (let’s not talk about that), and his attraction to her is “gone” (her words, not mine). He uses the “L” word with Katniss for the first time- in past tense (ouch! it burns!!!). And he says to her, “You’re not very big, are you? Or particularly pretty?” (MJ 230) Let’s just say that hijacked!Peeta isn’t immediately a fan of the bird in front of him. But he’s a homing bird, and time after time, he finds his way back to her. In the beginning of Mockingjay, Katniss notes that “Peeta would have nothing to come home to anyway. Except me…” (9). And he does. Again and again, he finds his way back home to her.
If Katniss is the mockingbird and Peeta is the jabberjay, that makes their children the mockingjay. Katniss had been drawn to the mockingjay since she was a child, admitting that there was “something comforting about the little bird” (THG 43). Despite her insistence on not having children within a totalitarian regime, the mockingjay always served as a symbol of hope for her, even if she didn’t want to admit why. Katniss and Peeta’s children are that hope- and “only Peeta” could give her that. Peeta finally gets Katniss to buy into that future, to allow herself to feel the hope he has always represented to her. Falling in love and having children together is the way to show the world that they, as people, are more than just pieces in anyone’s Games.
So Mockingjay must end with the children, with a girl and a boy who possess traits of each of their parents and who are a new species of mutt that the Capitol never intended to exist. These children are the most important characters in the series. Katniss and Peeta’s children are the symbol of hope that we were promised, as readers, from the very beginning. They are the mockingjay. They don’t know that they dance on the ashes on the dead, and that’s okay. The fire and ashes are in the past, and the mockingjay is the symbol of a hopeful future, freewheeling in a sunshine-filled meadow. Suzanne gives us that token to carry with us, to take into whatever games we find ourselves forced to play.
(And a shout-out to everlarkedalways for inspiring me to write this)
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