10 Amazing Moments in the Hunger Games Trilogy

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Do I need to say it? SPOILERS…

Also, this is a completely subjective list.

1. The Hunger Games: Katniss Won’t Be ignored

Katniss is in the Capitol for training prior to the Hunger Games. On the third day, she has a session with the Gamemakers. Readers are already impressed with Katniss’s devotion to her family and the hunting and bartering skills she’s developed since her father’s death. But this is our first taste of kick ass.

It’s excellent shooting. I turn to the Gamemakers. A few are nodding in approval, but the majority of them are fixated on a roast pig that has just arrived at their banquet table.

Suddenly I am furious, that with my life on the line, they don’t even have the decency to pay attention to me. That I’m being upstaged by a dead pig. My heart starts to pound, I can feel my face burning. Without thinking, I pull an arrow from my quiver and send it straight to the Gamemakers’ table. I hear shouts of alarm as people stumble back. The arrow skewers the apple in the pig’s mouth and pins it to the wall behind it. Everyone stares at me in disbelief.

“Thank you for your consideration, ” I say. Then I give a slight bow and walk straight toward the exit without being dismissed

Try not to compare it with the single arrow shot in Mockingjay. It’s too disappointing. Or to Kat’s writing of the Gamemaker’s name (Seneca Crane) on the dummy during her private session with the Gamemakers in Catching Fire : that one is too repetitive. This one is perfect, and her walking out without asking permission makes it all the sweeter.

2. The Hunger Games: The crescent moon of bread.

I know, I know. You think I should have put Rue’s death and Katniss’s wreathing her face and body in flowers. And yes, that is a heartbreaking moment. But what puts this lovely scene over the edge is that just when you think it’s over, and Katniss has returned to survival mode, a miracle occurs:

I’m about to haul my packs into a tree to make camp when a silver parachute floats down and lands in front of me. A gift form a sponsor. But why now? I’ve been in fairly good shape with supplies. Maybe Haymitch’s noticed my despondency and is trying to cheer me up a bit. Or could it be something to help my ear?

I open the parachute and find a small loaf of bread. It’s not the fine white of the Capitol stuff. It’s made of dark ration grain and shaped in a crescent. Sprinkled with seeds. I flashback to Peeta’s lesson on the various district breads in the Training Center. This bread came from District 11. I cautiously lift the still warm loaf. What must it have cost the people of District 11 who can’t even feed themselves? How many would’ve had to do without to scrape up a coin to put in the collection for this one loaf? It had been meant for Rue, surely. But instead of pulling the gift when she died, they’d authorized Haymitch to give it to me. As a thank-you? Or because, like me, they don’t like to let debts go unpaid? For whatever reason, this is a first. A district gift to a tribute who’s not your own.

I lift my face and step into the last falling rays of sunlight. “My thanks to the people of District Eleven,” I say. I want them to know I know where it came from. That the full value of the gift has been recognized.

This scene is so significant, I think, because it shows Katniss’ ability to create community. Community is the one thing the Capitol forbids most energetically, with everything from the separation of the districts geographically and economically, the barbed wire, and the Hunger Games themselves, designed to pit the people against one another instead of against the Capitol. Sure, Katniss can fight and kill and disobey with the best of them, but her real strength is her ability — really just by being herself — to unite people against the Capitol.

3. The Hunger Games: Cato’s Grotesque Demise

I don’t read horror, because I don’t usually enjoy long, drawn out descriptions of suffering or violence. But one thing I do appreciate is a sprinkling of horrific events or imagery in an otherwise non-horror novel. Someone who does this well is Charlaine Harris in the Sookie Stackhouse series. And I think Collins uses some horrific images to great effect in this trilogy. Think of the Avoxes, or the muttations, or the gore covered lizards in Mockingjay. What I especially liked about Cato’s death scene is the way it humanizes him. Cato is a Career, which means he’s from a district that is comparatively well off, and he’s been trained to enter the Hunger Games. Cato is large, brutal and mean. At the end of The Hunger Games, Katniss, Peeta, and Cato are defending themselves against the wolf-like muttations, when Cato falls to the ground and they descend upon him. Because Cato is wearing armor from neck to foot, and is well armed and trained, he is able to fend them off at first, but eventually they subdue him, the armor slows down their feast. Kat and Peeta have to listen all night to the sounds of Cato’s death: “moaning, begging, and finally just whimpering as the mutts work away at him.” When morning comes and Cato is still alive, Katniss decides to use her last arrow to put him out of his misery:

It takes a few moments to find Cato in the dim light, in the blood. Then the raw hunk of meat that used to be my enemy makes a sound, and I know where his mouth is. And I think the word he’s trying to say is please.

Pity, not vengeance, sends my arrow flying into his skull.

Along with Katniss, the reader has come to hate and fear Cato throughout the novel. With this scene, Collins humanizes him, and emphasizes his commonality with the protagonists and their shared suffering at the hands of the Capitol. Although Katniss rarely uses overtly moral language (indeed, there seems to be little explicit moral discourse at all in the novels) her distinction between pity and vengeance here clearly marks her out as a hero. This scene was part of an incredibly gripping finale to the Hunger Games, and also serves as an important insight into Katniss’s character — her sense that not only friends and allies, but enemies, deserve compassion.

4. Catching Fire: The Wedding Dress

Katniss and Peeta are forced to continue their pseudo-love affair with an engagement. Kat is sent wedding dresses to try on, and the districts vote on which they like best. She forgets all about the wedding and the dresses once she discovers she will have to fight in the Quarter Quell, but, to her shock, Kat is forced to wear the most popular wedding dress for the televised interviews prior to the games. As Katniss says, “It’s so barbaric, the president turning my bridal gown into my shroud…”.

But Cinna, Katniss’s stylist, has other plans. When Kat notices how much heavier the dress feels, Cinna shrugs and notes that he had to make some alterations. After an instruction not to twirl until the end of her interview, he sends Katniss off to face Master of Ceremonies. Caesar Flickmann. Here’s what happens:

My voice trembles as I speak. “Only that I’m so sorry you won’t get to be at my wedding … but I’m glad you at least get to see me in my dress. Isn’t it just … the most beautiful thing? I don’t have to look at Cinna for a signal. I know this is the right time. I begin to twirl slowly, raising the sleeves of my heavy gown above my head.

When I hear the scrams of the crowd, I think it’s because I must look stunning. Then I notice something is rising up around me. Smoke. From fire. Not the flickery stuff I wore last year in the chariot, but something much more real that devours my dress. I begin to panic as the smoke thickens. Charred bits of black silk swirl into the air, and pearls clatter to the stage. Somehow I’m afraid to stop because my flesh doesn’t seem to be burning and I know Cinna must be behind whatever is happening. So I keep spinning and spinning. For a split second I’m gasping, completely engulfed in the strange flames. Then all at once, the fire is gone. I slowly come to a stop, wondering if I’m naked and why Cinna has arranged to burn away my wedding dress.

But I’m not naked. I’m in a dress of the exact design of my wedding dress, only it’s the color of coal and made of tiny feathers. Wonderingly, I lift my long, flowing sleeves into the air, and that’s when I see myself on the television screen. Clothed in black except for the white patches on my sleeves. Or should I say my wings.

Because Cinna has turned me into a Mockingjay.

In this scene, repetition works. In both books 1 and 2, Cinna is Kat’s stylist, and in both books, he does something with her pre-games costume that is memorable. But the stakes are so much higher in Catching Fire. Katniss is unaware at this point of how significant the Mockingjay is to the revolution, but the reader knows. And the reader simultaneously learns that Cinna is not just a sane, empathetic port in the Capitol’s storm, but a person with conviction, daring, and a profound sense of justice. This moment has a special resonance for the reader, because in addition to being thrilled with the display (and this is an example of how Collins’ sketchiness on the technology of this dystopia works in her favor. I believe this fire trick without having to know why it worked.), there’s the tension of knowing Katniss is not with us on the political import, and wondering when she will get there.

5. Catching Fire : Katniss and Peeta attend a lavish banquet at President Snow’s mansion

The ceiling has been transformed into the night sky (a la Hogwarts!), musicians float by on clouds, overstuffed sofas and chairs are surrounded by flower gardens, ponds, and fireplaces, and there is an amazing array of delicacies, “everything you can think of, and things you have never dreamed of”. Kat and Peeta eat and eat, taking tiny morsels so they can sample as many dishes as possible. But eventually they are full.

“I can’t hold another bit,” I say. They all laugh as if that’s the silliest thing they’ve ever heard.

“No one lets that stop them!” says Flavius. They lead us over to a table that holds tiny stemmed wineglasses filled with clear liquid. “Drink this!”

Peeta picks one up to take a sip and they lose it.

“Not here!” shrieks Octavia.

“You have to do it in there,” says Venia, pointing to doors that lead to the toilets. “Or you’ll get it all over the floor!”

Peeta looks at the glass again and puts it together. “You mean this will make me puke?”

My prep team laughs hysterically. “Of course, so you can keep eating,” says Octavia. “I’ve been in there twice already. Everyone does it, or how else would you have any fun at a feast?”

I’m speechless, staring at the pretty little glasses and all they imply. Peeta sets his back on the table with such precision you’d think it might detonate. “Come on Katniss, let’s dance.”

At this point in the series, readers know the citizens of the Capitol are ignorant and uncaring about the fate of the districts. The Hunger Games is the most obvious example, but it’s there in everything, even names like “Venia” and “Flavius” which telegraph their focus on their own superficial concerns. But, for me, it was this scene that really brought home how vile the practices of the Capitol are. Collins has talked about the way figures like Theseus and Spartacus influenced her writing of Katniss. And Panem is Latin for bread, as in bread and circuses, the ultimate symbol of the triviality of the interests of the late Roman empire. Although “vomitoriums” in the sense used in this passage, are more myth than historical reality, for many readers today, they serve as a mythic symbol of excess and misplaced priorities.

The glasses have a similar impact on Peeta. When Kat tells him, “Peeta, they bring us here to fight to the death for their entertainment [...] Really, this is nothing by comparison”, she’s technically right, but there is something so symbolic in those little vials, that they move Peeta to rethink his strategy of subduing revolt in districts.

6. Catching Fire : Katniss and Peeta thank the people of District 11

After winning the Hunger Games, Kat and Peeta take a victory tour through the districts. Their visit to District 11 — the first stop – has them speaking from the Justice Building in the dilapidated town square. Katniss is terrified to address the large crowd, so Peeta agrees to speak for them both. The moment when Peeta promises the dead tributes’ families a share of their winnings is terrific, but my favorite is when Katniss realizes that she owes it to those families to speak.

“Wait!” I stumble forward, pressing the plaque to my chest. My allotted time for speaking has come and gone, but I must say something. I owe too much. And even if I had pledged all my winnings to the families, it would not excuse my silence today. “Wait, please.” I don’t know how to start, but once I do, the words rush from my lips as if they’ve been forming in the back of my mind for a long time.

“I want to give my thanks to the tributes of district eleven, ” I say. I look at the pair of women on Thresh’s side. “I only ever spoke to Thresh one time. Just long enough for him to spare my life. I didn’t know him, but I always respected him. For his power. For his refusal to play the Games on anyone’s terms but his own. The Careers wanted him to team up with them from the beginning, but he wouldn’t do it. I respected him for that.”

For the first time the hunched old woman — is she Thresh’s grandmother? — raises her head and the trace of a smile plays on her lips.

The crowd has fallen silent now, so silent that I wonder how they manage it. They must all be holding their breath.

I turn to Rue’s family. “But I feel as if I did know Rue, and she’ll always be with me. Everything beautiful brings her to mind. I see her in the yellow flowers that grow in the Meadow by my house. I see her in the mockingjays that sing in the trees. But most of all, I see her in my sister, Prim.” My voice is undependable, but I am almost finished. “Thank you for your children.” I raise my chin to address the crowd. “And thank you all for the bread.”

I stand there, feeling broken and small, thousands of eyes trained on me. There’s a long pause. Then from somewhere in the crowd, someone whistles Rue’s four-note mockingjay tune. The one that signaled the end of the workday in the orchards. The one that meant safety in the arena. By the end of the tune, I have found the whistler, a wizened old man in a faded red shirt and overalls. His eyes meet mine.

What happens next is not an accident. It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison. Every person in the crowd presses the three middle fingers of their left hand against their lips and extends them to me. It’s our sign from District 12, the last goodbye I gave Rue in the arena.

The normal community ties that should exist in a place like Panem, where each district plays its part in sustaining the whole have been artificially severed so that the Capitol can retain control over all of them. The bonding that takes place here between Districts 11 and 12 is completely subversive in that context, and this moment is a very powerful part of the revolt narrative. But it’s also a great moment for the character of Katniss. I love it that she is a reluctant hero, and the reader sees her take a huge step forward here, doing something not directly to save her family, but something for a larger community. And finally, because the guy in the overalls gets a bullet in his brain a paragraph later, it’s just a great part of a ripping yarn.

7. Catching Fire: Katniss Comes To

The end of the Quarter Quell was thrilling reading. Maybe I’m just not an astute reader, but it was a bit chaotic as well. So when Katniss “finally, truly” wakes up in a “large room with a low ceiling and a silvery light”, surrounded by other beds holding the other surviving tributes, the reader shares her sense of confusion. Katniss’s brain is still operating on the simple imperative she lost consciousness with — save Peeta — but now, believing they are captured by the Capitol, she grabs a syringe and resolves to find and kill him. Padding down the hallway in her nightgown, she hears voices. Believing the assembled group — Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee, District Four champion Finnick, and her own mentor, Haymitch — is aligned with the Capitol, she bursts in to the room, syringe at the ready. Shocked to see treetops passing by through the windows — they must be flying — she pauses, and then:

“Done knocking yourself out, sweetheart?” says Haymitch, the annoyance clear in his voice. But as I careen forward he steps up and catches my wrists, steadying me. He looks at my hand. “So you and syringe against the Capitol? See, this is why no one lets you make the plans.”

What follows is an alternate — and true — account of the events of the Quarter Quell that forces Katniss to reevaluate everything that happened, and everyone in the room. She has been kept in the dark about the escape plan, and her protective attitude towards Peeta have been used to manipulate her — apparently with little respect or regard — into playing the symbolic mockingjay of the rebellion. At the same time Katniss has to reorient her view of Haymitch and the others, the reader has had their kick ass heroine – the one whose arrow destroyed the entire arena — reduced to an ignorant pawn. I felt this was a very brave choice for Collins, and it thrilled me, because it was so unexpected, and because it meant Katniss was not going to follow the simple, upward trajectory Collins laid out when comparing her to Spartacus (“Katniss follows the same arc from slave to gladiator to rebel to face of a war.”).

8. Mockingjay: The new Peeta

In The Hunger Games, Peetna’s character was interesting in part because neither Katniss nor the reader was sure about his motives, specifically whether his being in love with Katniss was real, or a ploy to win the games. Also, he had some great sarcastic or insightful moments, and showed some toughness with Katniss when he disagreed with her. But Peeta had many of his sharp edges sanded down in Catching Fire. He became the safe bet, the steady partner, the guy who was devoted to Katniss, the guy who would always do the right thing. In Mockingjay, he appears only on Capitol TV for the first half of the book, seemingly slightly disoriented, but in agreement with President Snow that the rebels should sign a cease fire. Katniss is disturbed by this attitude, but she’s thrilled when Peeta is rescued and brought to District Thirteen:

Alive and well — maybe not well but alive and here. Away from Snow. Safe. Here. with me. In a minute I can touch him. See his smile. Hear his laugh.

Haymitch’s grinning at me. “Come on, then,” he says.

I’m light-headed with giddiness. What will I say? Oh, who cares what I say? Peeta will be ecstatic no matter what I do. He’ll probably be kissing me anyway. I wonder if it will feel like those last kisses on the beach in the arena, the ones I haven’t dared let myself consider until this moment.

Peeta’s awake already, siting on the side of the bed, looking bewildered as a trio of doctors reassure him, flash lights in his eyes, check his pulse. I’m disappointed that mine was not the first face he saw when he woke, but he sees it now. His features register disbelief and something more intense that I can’t quite place. Desire? Desperation? Surely both, for he sweeps the doctors aside, leaps to his feet, and moves toward me. I run to meet him, my arms extended to embrace him. His hands are reaching for me, too, to caress my face, I think.

My lips are just forming his name when his fingers lock around my throat.

And that’s the end of the chapter. Katniss wakes up in intensive care, and learns that Peeta’s brain has been “hijacked” with tracker jacker venom, such that his memories of her are infused with terror and doubt. I loved this scene for a couple of reasons. One, Katniss’s happy anticipation of their reunion is so unusual for her, it’s almost — but not quite — out of character. It makes what happens even more distressing. Two, Peeta has become interesting again. I was so sure that Collins was going to have Beetee find an antidote and restore Peeta completely to his old self, but no. Peeta never fully comes back. The steady, certain, sweet, morally upright breadmaker in love with the girl on fire is gone forever. I know a lot of fans hated this, but I thought Peeta was one of the real casualties of war that gave the story more gravity. And the changes in him — paradoxically because they make him a worse romantic prospect — force Kat to appreciate him more than she ever had.

9. Mockingjay: The Rule Book

Gale has been working with Beetee to adapt some of his hunting techniques for war. Katniss is invited to check out their work:

This is what they’ve been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale’s traps and adapting them into weapons against humans. Bombs mostly. It’s less about the mechanics of the traps than the psychology behind them. Boobytrapping an area that provides something essential to survival. A water or food supply. Frightening prey so that a large number flee into a greater destruction. Endangering offspring in order to draw in the actual desired target, the parent. Luring the victim into what appears to be a safe haven — where death awaits it. At some point, Gale and Beetee left the wilderness behind and focused on more human impulses. Like compassion. A bomb explodes. Time is allowed for people to rush to the aid of the wounded. Then a second, more powerful bomb kills them as well.

“That seems to be crossing some kind of line, ” I say. “So anything goes?” They both stare at me — Beetee with doubt, Gale with hostility. “I guess there isn’t a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.”

“Sure there is. Beetee and I have been following the same rule book President Snow used when he hijacked Peeta,” says Gale.

I think Katniss and Gale have some great exchanges in this book, and I had a hard time choosing between this one and the fight they get into after Katniss sees her prep team shackled in a rebel prison cell. But I chose this one, because I think Collins is doing something very effective here, extrapolating the techniques of war between humans from the techniques humans use to hunt nonhuman animals. Katniss makes reference to a “rule book”, which is the kind of thing humans might have, a moral rule book to be precise. Morality doesn’t govern animal to animal relations at all, and most people believe it only governs human to animal relations to the extent humans think it should. I read this passage as asking questions, like whether morality should govern human behavior when it conflicts with a practical (in these case, strategic) goal, and also whether humans cease being bound by moral rules when the other players on the field toss them out. In terms of Katniss and Gale’s relationship, I felt that, even more problematic than Gale’s outlook on morality (I take it his answers to the above two questions are “no”, and “yes”, putting him at odds with Katniss on these important issues), was his casual and cruel reference to Peeta’s torture to get Katniss to see his point of view. This scene is also foreshadowing of what happens later at the President’s House.

10. Mockingjay: The End

Near the end of Mockingjay, Plutarch the Gamemaker-turned-rebel shares a very cynical view of human nature with Katniss: “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.” But just a few pages later, we have Peeta showing up with primroses to plant in Prim’s memory, the mangy cat Buttercup making his way all the way back to District 12 from 13, and Katniss restoring him to health, Katniss, Peeta and Haymitch creating a visual history of beautiful moments and people, and, in the Epilogue, Katniss’s children, “who don’t know they play on a graveyard.”. The trilogy ends with Katniss wondering how she will “make her children understand in a way that will make them braver”:

I’ll tell them on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I’m afraid it could be taken away. That’s when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do. It’s like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.

But there are much worse games to play.

This is not exactly one moment, but if I had to pick one of my favorite lines in the book, it’s “I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do.” It’s just so like Katniss in its concreteness and simplicity, but it communicates something profound about the relation of moral value to other kinds of value, and the lessons she has learned in that regard. I couldn’t care less that she ends up with Peeta, that she finally has sex with Peeta, that she decides she can do without Gale’s rage, that Gale is kissing another pair of lips, etc., although judging from the Kindle highlights, these passages were very popular among other readers (and as an adult reader, I am likely in the minority). Collins herself has said, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.” and I think the bittersweet ending of Mockingjay reflects the author’s own vision.

So those are my personal top ten moments, although it was not easy to choose (leaving off Snow’s visit to District 12 was really hard). Stay tuned for a post on what did not work for me in the trilogy.

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