But what if it never vanished? What if all that pretense, that make-believe, wasn’t imaginary at all? What if your whole world, day-in and day-out, was made up of pretense, lies, and deceit? What if your life or your death depended on rules that change on a whim? What if to survive at all, you too have to learn to play a game of smoke and mirrors—to master a game constructed of lies, one that you can never control?

Katniss Everdeen, in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, is forced to do just that. Even as Katniss is engulfed in ever more vicious treachery, sinister tricks, and heartbreaking betrayals, her hero’s task is to penetrate the smoke and mirrors that delude herself and others until she can at last distinguish the real from the unreal, both in her own life and in Panem.

The government’s heavy hand hovers over the districts as it metes out draconian punishment for the smallest of offenses: illegal hunting merits a public whipping and/or time in the stocks, and even casual comments against the government lead to death—or to life—as an Avox, rendered mute and forced to live a life of slavery serving the wealthy denizens of the Capitol. To police its citizens the Capitol eavesdrops: during the first rebellion, it used muttations like the jabberjays, which could mimic human speech, to parrot back to the authorities everything they heard. Since then the government has employed alternate means mysterious to Katniss, but which we later learn include phone tapping.⁴ To insure that no one forgets the price of an uprising all of Panem is held in thrall by the Games and the terrible ritual of the reaping, where the child-tributes are ripped from their homes and families in order to kill each other.

Survival in such circumstances is difficult at best, but after Katniss’ father dies in a mining accident, survival for her and her family means constant negotiation of a maze of lies, pretense, and deception. The alternative: death by starvation, or an even worse fate than death. Rendered totally dysfunctional by grief, their mother couldn’t care for her children’s most basic needs, but if they look too disheveled, or grow weak and sick, Prim and Katniss would be taken by Peacekeepers to the Seam’s community home—an institution masquerading as a refuge. Community home kids arrive at Katniss’ school black and blue and battered.⁵ Katniss refuses to let Prim suffer this fate. But she has no “legal” recourse to stop the downward spiral of their existence. All she has are the forbidden hunting skills her father taught her. Though only eleven at the time, she braves the predatorfilled wilderness beyond the fenced-in borders and retrieves her bow and arrow to provide her first meager meal for her family.

The electrified perimeter fence Katniss breaches to reach the forest serves a dual purpose: it keeps dangerous predators out, but it also keeps residents in. Katniss, like most residents of the Seam, knows the fence is a sham. Current hasn’t run through it for years. Yet everyone pretends the fence is operational. That touching it will kill you. It’s also in need of mending, which is what allows Katniss to crawl underneath.

The defunct fence is one reason Katniss and Gale can ignore laws with impunity while feeding their families and bartering their daily catch for needed goods in the Hob, the District’s informal trading and black market hub. The other reason is the district’s powers-that-be, who with a wink and a nod condone not only the black market machine itself but also Katniss and Gale’s contribution to keeping it well-oiled and functioning. The Mayor is Katniss’ best customer for strawberries harvested beyond the fence. Even the Capitol’s Peacekeepers enjoy the illegal fare.

Both the thriving black market and the dysfunctional perimeter fence benefit everyone who lives in the Seam—rich or poor. The black market allows those who are better off access to delicacies available only to the Capitol’s residents and lets enterprising poor like Katniss survive. To acknowledge the fence is broken or that illicit trading is going on is to invite a crackdown from the Capitol, and District 12 is used to being left alone.

District 12 is so impoverished that until Katniss’ and Peeta’s return as victors, the Capitol has little interest in the local law enforcement. The residents are too weak and underfed to create much trouble—as long as the Seam continues to produce enough coal to fuel Panem’s energy needs, the Capitol is content to ignore it.

Of course, taking advantage of that neglect still requires Katniss to play her own game of Let’s Pretend—to constantly conjure up her own version of smoke and mirrors. She must go to the Mayor’s backdoor to sell her strawberries because she can’t afford “to be seen” doing so, even though the Mayor himself is her customer. She trades the meat she gets with Peacekeepers, but she must stow her bow and arrow in a hollow log inside the forest, much as her father did. Being caught with weapons is a capital offense in Panem. So Katniss adheres to the letter of the law, careful never to be seen with a weapon, even though her customers know she must use one to hunt.

Katniss has also mastered the art of masquerade, at least in terms of her feelings. To keep her family alive and safe, Katniss continually masks her resentment toward the unjust system that keeps everyone hungry, weak, and dependent on the corrupt Capitol. Keenly aware of the long arm of the Capitol, never knowing who is listening to what she, or Prim, or Gale might say in an unguarded moment, Katniss harbors a deep anger and resentment toward the Capitol. The very existence of the reaping further fuels the fire in her belly. But it is a fire she has learned to keep hidden. To express any disapproval of government policies is a death sentence. Whether she hunts or not, whether she is angry or not, doesn’t matter. What is important is how her actions appear.

By the day of the reaping, Katniss has become a grade-A student of deceit. On her home turf she has first hand experience of the Capitol’s sleight of hand: the electrified fence with no current, the Peacekeepers who pretend not to know she owns weapons, the horrors inside the supposed refuge of the Community Home. Nothing is ever what it seems. And not only has she learned to see through the Capitol’s trickery and find which rules can be bent, even broken without repercussions, she has mastered the skills to take advantage of that vision. Her life in District 12 has been a kind of boot camp, or prep school, training her not just with the physical skills of a hunter, but also teaching her to be able to mask her feelings, to live inside a necessary lie—just to survive.

So in many ways Katniss is well prepared for the Games. The skills that allow her to hunt successfully for food can be easily if not comfortably applied to killing her fellow tributes. And she intuits immediately that a tribute who—even at the reapings—seems weak and fearful, like a frightened rabbit or deer, will go down fast in the arena. No sponsors will ever come to a weakling’s rescue. Thus, standing in front of the crowds at the reaping, she both knows to and is able to feign boredom, her face betraying none of the emotions roiling inside her.

But even as she first boards the train that will take her to the Capitol Katniss is brutally aware that she has to ramp up her survival tactics—fast! No one can be trusted—not even the boy whose one kind gesture when they were children stirred the embers of her flickering instinct to survive. She is determined never to drop her guard; she must remain as wary as she did while hunting—wary now just not of animal predators but of everything and every person she encounters before and during the Games.

Katniss is good at figuring out rules and how to get around them, and these skills help her discern the complex patterns the Gamemakers wove into the Games. Certain sections of the arena, she realizes, present specific threats. This is even more apparent in Catching Fire, where the arena’s horrors are timed to be released at specific hours in specific predictable quadrants—jabberjays, acid fog, killer monkeys. Katniss also understands the Gamemakers’ need to keep the TV audience entertained. A day with no kills, no action, might bore the audience and so always leads to a ramping up of challenges in the arena.

These are all things Katniss can learn and then predict. But what makes the Games so treacherous is that even the things that should be predictable frequently aren’t—and being caught unaware, by another tribute or by one of the Gamemakers’ toys, can lead to death. After all, these “toys” are specifically designed to catch tributes unaware.

Snares—physical and psychological—play crucial roles in Collins’ trilogy. Snares are by nature hidden: a passive weapon, they are usually some kind of net or wire that is camouflaged, often cleverly buried in leaf litter, to trap unsuspecting game so that they may be more easily killed later. Snares are considered fair play for the hunter, and the first ones the reader encounters seem innocuous enough—as long as you aren’t a rabbit or squirrel caught in one of Gale’s ingenious traps. But in the arena the victims are not rabbits, but humans. Ill-fated Rue, certainly one of the most compelling characters in the series, meets her death in The Hunger Games when she is caught in a net and then speared like a helpless rabbit or fawn.

Catching Fire extends the concept of snares with Beetee’s masterful, rather complicated use of wire to electrify the area of the jungle near the Cornucopia, and thus kill two of the other tributes. And the urban battleground of Mockingjay is literally a minefield of snares—fiendish pods that lay in wait for passersby and that incorporate the Capitol’s weapons, either familiar ones from the arena games or new, even more nefarious creations.

But the series’ most memorable snare of all doesn’t need a net. In a tried and true terrorist device borrowed from our world, bombs hidden in parachutes are dropped from a hovercraft with the Capitol insignia onto a group of children outside of Snow’s mansion. Parachutes are familiar to the kids from watching the Games: they deliver presents, good things. But these parachutes are deadly, exploding when the children grab them. And as rebel medics, horrified Capitol Peacekeepers, and citizens rush in to help, a second fiery bomb explodes, maiming and killing the would-be rescuers.

This brilliant amoral snare, a more complex, heinous version of one of Gale and Beetee’s traps, works because it understands the psychology of its targets and uses that understanding to undo them. Reluctantly Katniss comes to believe the exploding parachutes are the work of the rebellion. But everyone else remains convinced the Capitol is responsible for the unconscionable devastation; after all, the weapon bears all the hallmarks of Snow and company’s brutally effective mind games

Mutts—short for “muttations,” the foul genetic products of the Capitol’s continued quest for means to subdue Panem’s citizens—are another of the Gamemakers’ favorite weapons. In the first book, mutts resembling huge wolves attack Katniss, Peeta, and Cato at the Cornucopia. But it is when Katniss looks into the beasts’ eyes that the true horror of the mutts is revealed: Rue, Foxface, all the dead tributes, allies and foes alike, stare out at her. In case she is in doubt she sees the number eleven on the collar circling the neck of the one whose eyes belong to District 11’s tribute, Rue. Jabberjays are manipulated to mimic the agonized cries of people dear to the tributes, and in the second Games, they practically drive Katniss and Finnick to suicide. Then there are the tracker jackers, armed with hallucinogenic venom. Katniss herself is stung during the first Games and, even with a mild dose, experiences mind-bending apparitions. One of her ghoulish visions shows “ants crawl[ing] out of the blisters on my hands.” She later she tells us that the “nature of [the] venom ... target[s] the place where fear lives in your brain” (The Hunger Games). And of course it is tracker jacker venom that President Snow uses on Peeta to alter his memories of Katniss.

What all these weapons have in common is that, at their core, they are about deception. The snares rely on deception to lure their victims in, whether they appear to be safe, solid ground (but turn out to be a net) or a parachuted care package (but turn out to be a bomb). The jabberjays and the wolf mutts that attack Katniss and Peeta at the end of the first Games are also effective only through deception: it’s the tributes’ belief that they are hearing their loved ones being tortured (or that the jabberjays are repeating their loved ones’ screams) and Katniss and Peeta’s initial belief that they are seeing the dead tributes looking through the mutts’ eyes that makes them truly horrific. And deception is at the very heart of the tracker jackers’ effectiveness; their venom’s power is in rendering victims unable to tell what is real from what is not.

After the initial surprise, Katniss is able to cope with the deceptions used against her by the Gamemakers. What challenges Katniss most are the psychological deceptions she must take part in to survive—the costumes, the interviews, but in particular, the deception involving Peeta. It takes all her willpower to go along with Haymitch’s strategy, spelled out during their first meal in the Training Center, that she and Peeta are to feign friendship. Katniss is comfortable play-acting the absence of emotion, but pretending that she and Peeta are linked emotionally is repugnant to her. It’s an out-and-out lie, but, like many others in Katniss’ odyssey, one she must embrace. Katniss agrees to it, but she does so with great skepticism. Eventually she will have to kill Peeta, or he’ll have to kill her. Her promise to Prim makes it perfectly clear to her who is going to kill whom in the end. So what is the purpose in pretending?

After all, while the Hunger Games have many rules—and part of the deception is the way rules change midway through the fray—there is one rule Katniss believes is immutable: the lone victor takes no prisoners, leaves no survivors. The Games have always worked that way—until now, when the Gamemakers pull a double switch-a-roo. Their first change—two tributes from the same district can both be victors if they are the last two tributes standing. But when Peeta and Katniss emerge victorious, the rules abruptly change back again—only one of them will be permitted to live. It’s a deception it does not occur to Katniss to be wary of, and one she refuses to abide by. With bold defiance, she uses her knack for circumventing the Capitol’s rules to save both herself and Peeta.

Of course, Katniss’ defiance brings severe repercussions. Midaction Katniss doesn’t consider what this will mean for her after the Games, or for her mother and Prim. In retrospect this seems naïve of her—after her time in the arena, hasn’t she learned that nothing is certain in the shifting realities of Snow’s Panem?

The reward of the Games has always been security and freedom from want for the victor (or in this case, victors) and his or her family. But Katniss’ bitter lesson comes via President Snow. He decrees that if she doesn’t obey his new directives, everything and everyone she loves will be destroyed. His directives are simple: continue the charade of love for Peeta or else. Later we learn that the idea that winning the Games means safety and happiness is itself a deception, and not just for Katniss. Haymitch should have been a clue, but it is not until Finnick shocks Panem with a tell-all on a rebellion-controlled broadcast that we truly understand how much of a lie it is. “In a flat removed tone ... ” Finnick tells us that his image as “golden boy” back in the Capitol was a sham (Mockingjay). The glamor and glitter of his life as a victor cloaks a truly sordid reality: handsome, desirable, idolized by the viewers of the Games, Finnick was condemned by Snow to serve as a sex slave, forced to sell his body to Snow’s allies as a favor or to other wealthy Capitol denizens for great sums of money destined for Snow’s deep pockets. Refusing to follow Snow’s orders was unthinkable. Any protest would doom the people he loved.

Finnick’s revelations unmask the real post-Games plight of the victors: there’s no safe house to return to from the arena. No promises will be kept. As long as they live they can never drop their guards again.

Trust is a dangerous commodity in Panem. In the first book, even in the relative seclusion of the forest Katniss lowers her voice when discussing the reaping with Gale because “even here you worry someone would hear you.” As it turns out, this was not just paranoia—Snow reveals the fact that her hunting excursions with Gale—including the one time they actually kissed—were all reported to him.

Katniss knows she cannot trust the Capitol. But even the behavior of those she should be able to trust is frequently revealed to be questionable—at times even purposely deceitful.

Haymitch’s continued inebriation is no act, and yet he is startlingly aware—in the way that a long-term alcoholic can be—of exactly what is going on around him and what he is doing. So is his act spontaneous or staged? Is he calculating to get the cameras off Katniss? Is his boozy diatribe a drunken outburst, or is it a message to the Capitol?

From the very first book we know Haymitch is more than what he first appears. He is more than capable of making decisions without consulting those his decisions affect—as when he has Peeta announce his feelings for Katniss during the pregame interview without warning Katniss ahead of time. Yet Katniss trusts him enough to broker a deal in Catching Fire: Haymitch and Peeta collaborated to save her in the first Games; in the Quarter Quell, it’s Peeta’s turn to be saved. But after being rescued from the arena, she is furious to learn that deal was a ruse and the rebellion leaders, with Haymitch’s input, opted to save her, not Peeta. On the hovercraft she physically strikes out at him.

During Mockingjay she puts as much distance between them as she can in such tight quarters, still stung by his betrayal. Katniss frequently refuses to obey him, ripping off her earpiece when sent into District 8, ignoring his orders, and almost getting herself killed. Her feelings toward Haymitch are complicated: part of her is glad he is undergoing terrible withdrawal symptoms in the teetotalling environment of District 13. But later she worries he is so sick he might die. Then the next moment she reminds herself she doesn’t care. When they do finally have face-to-face time alone, they both admit they failed to keep Peeta safe—though nothing they could have done in the arena would have saved him. The guilt they both feel is not resolved, and yet they are at least honest with each other. And by the end of the book she at least trusts that he will understand why she says “yes” to Coin’s proposal for one last Hunger Games and that he will back her up by saying yes, too.

Though Haymitch rarely does what Katniss wants him to, he at least does seem to have her long-range interests at heart. The architects behind the rebellion itself, as we and Katniss eventually learn, have little regard for Katniss’ best interests at all.

When the mirage is dispelled at the end of Catching Fire and we learn that District 13 is a real brick-and-mortar place, I cheered. But this is Panem after all, and what seems to be real never is. For soon the ugly truth is revealed. The district proves to be a distorted mirror-image of the Capitol itself.

District 13’s continued existence is more than hinted at in Catching Fire during Katniss’ encounter in the Forest with District 8 escapees Bonnie and Twill, who clue her in to the looped tape of 13’s devastation that the Capitol has been using in its TV broadcasts. Even so, it’s a shock to both Katniss and us when 13 has a hovercraft, not to mention a fully functioning underground society. As Katniss learns, 13 is the real “seat” of the rebellion, the brains and part of the brawn behind it all. Thirteen still possesses nuclear weapons, airpower, and a population where everyone is trained to be a soldier.

When the reader first enters District 13 there is no inkling of how it has managed not just to survive the earlier rebellion, but how it continues to exist. How it is able to welcome the refugees from District 12? It integrated them immediately into its community—under the condition that they adhere to the austere conditions: the strict enforcement of food rationing; the requisite military training; the martinet-like adherence to minuteby-minute schedules.

Along with Katniss, we gradually discover that District 13 has not welcomed the survivors out of kindness—oh, no! It has acted primarily to replenish its population, recently decimated by a pox that left many of the survivors infertile—Katniss notices the relative paucity of children in the district.

And then we meet Coin. Alma Coin is the president of the District. Katniss’ gut reaction to her—something that, by this point in the series, the reader trusts—is wonderfully described by Collins: “Her eyes are gray ... The color of slush that you wish would melt away” (Mockingjay). There is a cold, calculating quality to Coin—and comparing her eyes to “slush” foreshadows that she is really a counterpoint and twisted mirror image of the Capitol’s President Snow.

We learn that District 13’s survival occurred because of a kind of “deal with the devil” they negotiated with the Capitol. After all, it was only 13 and the Capitol that possessed nuclear weapons—enough to blow most of Panem to bits and to render the whole country a radioactive wasteland. So the Capitol let 13 survive on the condition that District 13 be portrayed as a smoldering, uninhabited ruin through the fakery of old video tape aired endlessly on TV. Thirteen made the deal, and the appalling images of 13’s destruction quenched the burgeoning rebellion. No other district wanted to meet the same fate. On this make-believe foundation the Capitol built its tyrannical reign.

District 13 did not just go away, however. Instead, it bided its time, until it could launch a new rebellion. Its tentacles were carefully spread through many districts, and we learn at the end of Catching Fire that at least in terms of saving Katniss in the Quarter Quell, tributes from Districts 3, 4, 7, 8, and 11 were in on the plan.

But as the story plunges into out-and-out guerilla warfare, the mask of Coin’s idealism begins to crack. Coin not only plans to have Katniss conveniently killed, a move worthy of Snow, but her plans after the rebels take the Capitol and imprison Snow show that her own innate corruption and evil matches Snow to the letter—not the “final” Games she proposes, but the way she goes about proposing them. By having the surviving victors of the Games vote on whether the children of the Capitol should become arena tributes, she defends herself against any blame. It’s a move calculated to keep her above public censure. She could tell the populace that sentencing more children to death was not her decision.

Alma Coin’s twisted ambition isn’t District 13’s only mirror-image of Capitol corruption. Though the seeming reality of District 13’s culture is one of great discipline, the militaristic code of the place leads to unspeakable horrors that reflect back the images of torture practiced in the Capitol.

The imprisonment of Katniss’ prep team is one example.

After their kidnapping from the Capitol, Flavius, Octavia, and Venia are certainly treated no worse than the refugees from District 12. Their punishment for repeatedly breaking the rules and hoarding an extra piece of bread, we’re told, is the same as any native of 13 would have experienced. But the prison conditions would have been torturous for anyone, and are especially so for those unused to any hardship or want. And couching their extended imprisonment as needed discipline is a ruse that fools no one from the Capitol (Fulvia and Plutarch Heavensbee), and certainly not Katniss, Haymitch, or Gale.

If any good comes out of Katniss’ discovery of her prep team’s plight, it’s that she is able to verbalize what she has only suspected up to that point: Coin’s corruption. “‘Punishing my prep team’s a warning,’ I tell Fulvia and Heavensbee. ‘Not just to me. But to you, too. About who’s really in control and what happens if she’s not obeyed’” (Mockingjay). Coin, and by extension the district, has become a warped mirror-image of the very regime they wish to destroy—and the least trustworthy bunch in the series.⁶

In The Hunger Games Katniss declares, “In the woods waits the only person with whom I can be myself. Gale.” An interesting observation: she cannot totally be herself even with her beloved Prim, the little sister for whom she has risked her life. If Prim inadvertently, innocently repeats anything critical of the government, imprisonment, torture, or worse would befall the whole family. As for her mother—Katniss considers her too weak to trust. Certainly she’s too unreliable to protect Prim.

Right through the end of Catching Fire Katniss continues to trust Gale. He alone has not betrayed or lied to her. His presence on the District 13 rescue helicopter shocks her, but the fact he is there at her most desperate hour of need reaffirms their abiding friendship. He has turned up in spite of his having to witness, during the Quarter Quell broadcasts, her declarations of love for Peeta and the “fact” of her pregnancy—knowing only Peeta could be the father. Gale is the rock she can lean on and trust, no matter what other fate befalls her. Her faith in Gale crumbles, however, beneath the weight of his betrayal in Mockingjay.

Betrayal is close kin to deception, more insidious because only someone you have confided in or bared your heart to, someone you trusted completely, can really betray you. And because of that, the most shattering betrayal Katniss experiences is ultimately by Gale, even though his betrayal is unintentional and not aimed at Katniss. She is just a wounded bystander. Poisoned by the horror of the Capitol’s offenses and of war, he becomes so hardened that he is now incapable of understanding how Katniss can’t share his “take no survivors” mentality.

When, finally able to go hunting in District 13, they are able to talk in private for the first time since Katniss’ rescue, their conversation ultimately leads to a fight. Gale questions her defense of her prep team, recovering at that time under her mother’s care in the district’s medical center. Katniss tries to explain to him that they are simple in a child-like way—that they really cared for her—and that the penalty for stealing bread is not so very different from Gale’s whipping by Thread back home for hunting a turkey. Her arguments fall flat—even for herself. She feels Gale may be right; at the same time her heart tells her he is wrong.

Gale’s next betrayal further ruptures Katniss’ sense of trust. After Katniss and Finnick accidently witness a devastating broadcast of Peeta’s second interview, Katniss waits for Gale to tell her about it. He never does—even though she asks—until eventually she forces him to admit that he knew about it. He lied to her by omission.

By the time Gale and Beetee engineer the collapse of the mountain in District 2, Katniss sees that Gale has become—or perhaps always was—someone whose compassion extends only to a small sphere of family and friends. Anyone, and as it turns out everyone—including, depending on how one reads the events at the end of Mockingjay, Prim—can be sacrificed to serve the greater good. Ends justify even the most amoral means. It is a true betrayal of all that motivates Katniss’ personal and eventually “public” life as the Mockingjay.

Gale’s own knife-sharp sense of right and wrong gets increasingly blunted as the tale unfolds, until the one person Katniss trusted in the first book becomes someone whose heart and mind is closed to her by the end of the story.

Katniss is accustomed to mistrust, and it is easy to turn it on Peeta. As she witnesses Peeta approaching their train to the Capitol in The Hunger Games all puffy-eyed and blotchy from crying, her reaction is swift, her judgment brutal: Is this part of his strategy? To appear weak and soft-hearted? Immediately she questions the reality of Peeta’s emotions; and through Katniss’ suspicion, Collins plants our own doubts. Is Peeta all about tactics, or is his open, good-hearted nature the real thing? Later on, is his declaration of love for Katniss during Cesar Flickerman’s interview for real—or part of some Machiavellian ability to scheme?

Katniss’ suspicions, however, are not written in stone—far from it. One minute she is sure Peeta has allied himself with the Careers to kill her; only a short time later when she is sick and disoriented from tracker jacker venom she realizes “Peeta Mellark just saved my life” (The Hunger Games).

Before entering the arena for the first time, during the interview with Cesar Flickerman, Peeta catches her totally off guard when he declares shyly that the one girl he’s ever had a crush on is Katniss, the fellow tribute he will be compelled to kill if he wants to be the victor.

Not only is she shocked, she’s furious. She actually shoves him when they are alone. But her anger and confusion mount exponentially when she learns that Haymitch and Peeta had discussed this whole approach before the interview: Peeta in love with Katniss. A brilliant strategy. But the idea that Peeta is telling the truth still haunts her. Does he actually care for her?

As Haymitch reminds her in that same scene when she insists they are not star-crossed lovers, “Who cares? It’s all a big show. It’s how you’re perceived” (The Hunger Games).

When it comes to something as personal as romance, Katniss instinctively recoils. Although she is sixteen at the start of the trilogy, she has never given any conscious thought to romance.⁷ And then there is Gale back home, rooting for her and at the same time witness to Peeta’s televised declaration. Katniss can’t help but wonder about the effect on him, which makes her begin to wonder about her own feelings—and yet, as Haymitch says, it’s all just an act, and one that serves her well.

However, this act becomes even more difficult to pull off in Catching Fire. After Snow dictates the course of her future with Peeta, Peeta himself throws another wrench into the works. He announces she is pregnant. Katniss is horrified, and yet has to play along—and then realizes of course that this gives her another advantage both in the arena and with sponsors. While Katniss is expert at negotiating deceptions to achieve her aims, Peeta, like Haymitch, is expert at achieving his aims by creating them.⁸

To further complicate matters, Katniss is not sure of her own feelings. Is she falling in love? By the end of Catching Fire, neither we nor she is sure. But Katniss has finally come to a place where she trusts his feelings if nothing else. Which is, naturally, when she learns she cannot—when a rescued Peeta turns out to have been hijacked and does not love her at all anymore, his memories manipulated into cruel versions of reality in which Katniss is his enemy.

The whole series, and Peeta and Katniss’ entire relationship, is fraught with the challenge of distinguishing reality from unreality, but Peeta’s hijacking may best illustrate the overriding conundrum of the series. Not only can Katniss not trust Peeta, but Peeta cannot even trust himself.

In District 13 they remain largely separated as Peeta is treated, but when the rebels invade the Capitol, Coin sends Peeta into battle alongside Katniss. His better self has been partially reclaimed, but he is still unable to tell real memories from altered ones and is still unstable, with unpredictable violent outbursts—all aimed at Katniss.

Though he is heavily guarded, Katniss remains wary. One minute his behavior is normal; the next minute it is lethal. Katniss’ own feelings swing wildly: Can she trust him or not? Peeta’s untrustworthiness is Snow’s fault, not his own, but that doesn’t change the reality that if Katniss guesses wrong at any moment and lets down her guard, she could die.

Her eventual reclamation of their friendship begins with a game of “Real or Not Real”—a poignantly explicit version of the game the two of them have been playing all along. Through it, they are able to find their way back to each other, until, just prior to the epilogue, when Peeta asks: “‘You love me. Real or not real?’” Katniss is at last able to tell him, “‘Real’” (Mockingjay).

Smoke and fog—literal and figurative—engulf Katniss throughout the Hunger Games. Toxic fogs in the arena and oily miasmas that fill the alleys and streets of the Capitol battleground threaten her very survival. But the hardest to penetrate is her own blindness: she cannot read the state of her heart. What does she feel? And for whom?

One or two feelings are perfectly clear to her:⁹ Her unequivocal love for Prim. Her hatred of President Snow. Perhaps one can also add in a more general way her deep sense of the immorality and horror of the Games.

What makes Katniss a compelling heroine is that she is a bundle of contradictions. She’s a pro at hiding her feelings beneath a stony, angry exterior; at the same time she’s a terrible actress. Whenever she has to “perform”—to sell herself—to an audience, she’s a flop. It’s Cinna who tells her from the outset to “be herself,” to “be honest”—Cinna’s job is to create artifice, and yet confronted with Katniss, he sees that she shines best in her own light, with her own natural beauty and manner. And this is a clue to the “real” Katniss, the person she herself is not yet acquainted with.

Katniss frequently doubts her own motivations. For a time she even becomes caught up in Peeta’s post-hijacking delusions. Her own guilt about the devastation her actions seem to have triggered—the destruction of District 12, so many people’s pain, suffering, and death—mounts. Is she really a cold-blooded killer? She slaughters other tributes in the arenas; she longs to murder Snow. What kind of person does that make her? One incapable of feeling? She fears all this, and Peeta’s Capitolinduced rants home in on her own sense of failure and guilt and seem to confirm her suspicions: “Finally he sees me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly” (Mockingjay ). She grows increasingly confused. If Peeta, the one person who has always thought the best of her, can be convinced of all this, what must others think of her? What should she think of herself?

A lovely summation of just what other people think about Katniss appears in Mockingjay right after she has failed miserably while rehearsing a scripted propo. Much to her chagrin, Haymitch takes control of the situation and asks the group gathered in Command exactly when Katniss during the Games made them “feel something real” (Mockingjay). The answers come, and with every memory we, if not yet Katniss, are assured she is neither a cold-hearted killer nor incapable of love. It’s her acting that is pathetic, not the state of her heart.

Because Katniss has been so hurt in the past, she has built a barrier around her heart. Or maybe, in the language of these Games, she has become ensnared by pain. She is defensive. She cannot believe people would love her—until in desperate circumstances she has no choice but to see that they do. Not just her closest acquaintances and friends, but strangers, like the injured in the hospital in District 8 who, even maimed or dying, recognize her face and reach for her, joyful that she is alive to carry on the cause—everyone who has been inspired by her fiery determination to right horrendous wrongs.

Ultimately Katniss is able to admit that at times she has acted from the part of her that is Snow’s—and perhaps Coin’s—equal. Her unerring instinct for survival has made her behave in ways her better self isn’t proud of. But ultimately, too, she is able to make peace with her role. By seeing and embracing who she truly is, good and bad, she is able to see through one of the Capitol’s greatest illusions: that she is responsible for the rebellion, rather than merely the means by which they were overthrown.

Katniss discovers that, even after all she has been through and all she has lost, she is still capable of love. That Snow and the evils of the Capitol have not stolen the possibility of new beginnings, or of having children, for whom the Games will be old history. In the end, the smoke clears and the mirror reflects only the truth—only what is real.