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Suzanne CollinsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
A distraught Coriolanus finds himself on a train to District 12 despite requesting any other place—reasoning that “anonymity was a condition greatly to be desired” (323-24). While he travels, he reflects on his meeting with Dean Highbottom and his unethical behavior in mentoring Lucy Gray. Coriolanus notes the media’s unusual silence: “It was as if the Hunger Games had never happened” (330).
Upon becoming a Peacekeeper, Coriolanus is at least pleased that the training makes him too tired to think too much and that he always has enough to eat. He receives a letter from Tigris, informing him that the family home “is officially going on the market now” (336), which prompts Coriolanus to reflect on what he feels is the tragedy of his life. He resolves never to return to the Capitol—only to look up and see Sejanus in Peacekeeper fatigues.
Despite their complicated friendship, Coriolanus is “relieved to have someone to talk to who knew his world and, more importantly, his true worth in that world” (344). Sejanus tells Coriolanus that those back home believe he left out of love for Lucy Gray; his cheating was kept silent. Coriolanus is pleased to hear that a local band—with a singer named “Lucy somebody” (343)—plans to perform in the near future. He wishes to reunite with his former mentee.
A potential rebel sympathizer is scheduled for execution prior to said concert. The pair are required to attend—and Coriolanus is “frightened” by District 12’s “level of want” (347). He thought his life was difficult, but what he sees here is worse. As the hanging commences, a commotion breaks out: A young woman emerges, running toward the condemned man. He, in turn, cries out to her, “Run, Lil! Run! Ru—!” (350) before the trapdoor is released. His words continue to echo.
At first, Coriolanus thinks he might be crazy, hearing the dead man’s last words ring out repeatedly, but then he realizes that the surrounding birds—genetically mutated jabberjays—are mimicking the sounds. This is his first encounter with jabberjays and their half-mockingbird offspring: “Coriolanus felt sure he’d spotted his first mockingjay, and he disliked the thing on sight” (352). These birds are the accidental creation of the Capitol’s one-time weapon during the war.
Sejanus is horrified by the hanging. Coriolanus grows impatient with his friend’s ethical struggles despite his own discomfort. He thinks to himself, of the Plinth family, “[a] munitions giant with a pacifist heir. […] What a waste of a dynasty” (256). They later visit the Hob where they expect to see Lucy Gray. Coriolanus notices that his beard is filling in, that “he was leaving boyhood behind” (358).
Coriolanus is both thrilled and terrified by his own anticipation, dazzled by how beautiful Lucy Gray is in her element. He approaches the stage to reunite with her, but is interrupted by another boy and the mayor’s daughter: Lucy Gray’s former lover and the girl for whom he left her.
Coriolanus learns that the boy—Billy Taupe—Lucy Gray, and the Covey still harbor bad blood between them. Billy Taupe appears to be drunk and a brawl breaks out as Coriolanus recalls Dr. Gaul’s assessment of humanity. The Peacekeepers detain the mayor’s daughter, Mayfair, ostensibly for her own safety. They ask Coriolanus and Sejanus to escort her home, where Billy Taupe is already waiting for her. Coriolanus surmises that this love triangle had something to do with Lucy Gray’s selection at the reaping. He struggles with what to tell Lucy Gray, not wanting to stir up her feelings for the former flame.
He decides to meet Lucy Gray in secret after enlisting Sejanus’s help in navigating the Seam where the Covey live. They meet Maude Ivory, Lucy Gray’s cousin, who leads them to her. Sejanus and Maude Ivory give the two privacy, and Coriolanus catches Lucy Gray singing a song about a “hanging tree.” After a bit of catching up, she claims that “[w]e’re responsible for each other’s lives now” (386) and they kiss; Coriolanus is glad to have a “guarantee of her loyalty” (386). The couple later come across Billy Taupe and Sejanus looking at the latter’s dirt drawing–that of the Peacekeepers’ base.
Billy Taupe and Lucy Gray confront each other, with Coriolanus intimating that the latter was, in fact, the one who was unfaithful first. Putting that far from his mind, Coriolanus questions Sejanus, who admits that Billy Taupe and some others wish to rescue the girl at the hanging. She is imprisoned at the base and Sejanus feels obligated to help, as he believes their cause is just.
During their argument, Coriolanus learns that Dr. Gaul “had defended him” in his conduct (399); he decides to write her a quick—but unapologetic—letter. He then decides to take the officer’s test, hoping to salvage his disastrous placement with the Peacekeepers. Coriolanus is also pleased to hear that his suggestion to cull the jabberjay and mockingjay populations was taken into account: The recruits plan to keep a few birds for study before eliminating the rest. However, he runs the risk of being recognized by Dr. Gaul’s cohorts.
Coriolanus receives a letter from Ma, thanking him for being Sejanus’s friend and protector. He ruminates on Sejanus’s loyalty, worrying that their friendship—as disingenuous as it was on his side—might threaten his own future. He looks through Sejanus’s belongings and finds a stash of money hidden in a picture frame. He feels puzzled as there isn’t much to buy in impoverished District 12 before realizing that “there were other things you could buy. Like information, and access, and silence. There were bribes. There was power” (408). When he mentions how grateful he is for Ma’s baked goodies—which were used to barter for admission and liquor at the Hob—as “[o]therwise we’d all be flat broke” (409), Sejanus lies easily. Coriolanus concludes that this “meant that now anything he said was suspect” (409).
Coriolanus’s moral evolution is key to this section. From Dean Highbottom’s scathing assessment of his character to his own discomfort with District 12 and its “unnatural” mockingjays, Coriolanus becomes a creature of the Capitol, Dr. Gaul’s creature in particular. The fact that he reaches out to her via letter—a teacher he once despised and still fears—reveals much about Coriolanus’s unrequited desires for power and recognition. This section also details how Coriolanus copes with his own disappointment and trials—with scheming.
Dean Highbottom excoriates Coriolanus for his behavior during the Games, even going so far as to insult his mother and expressing pleasure at his father’s death. He mocks the young man, twisting his mantra to “Do you hear that, Coriolanus? It’s the sound of Snow falling” (324). Snow, at least at this point, does not land on top. Coriolanus justifies himself—his killing of the tribute was in self-defense; his helping Lucy Gray was of love, not a desire to win—and worries more about others’ opinions rather than his own actions. He notes the Capitol’s silence in regards to the Games: Between the bombing and mentorships, many Capitol lives were lost, making this year an unmitigated disaster. Coriolanus realizes that “I’m being erased […]. And to erase me, they must erase the Games” (330). He is always at the center of his own carefully cultivated universe, Lucy Gray sharing such a fate being a second thought.
Once in District 12, Coriolanus blames the people “for their plight” (348) rather than recognizing how the Capitol’s policies—and to an extent, his own privilege—engender these conditions. His measured take on Dr. Gaul’s Hobbesian view of the world—that men are monsters in constant warfare, as in one of the book’s many epigraphs—begins to inform his own worldview. One of his observations about Lucy Gray’s home in the Seam is that there is no television set: “Dr. Gaul could go on all she wanted about engaging people in the Hunger Games, but if practically no one in the districts had a working television, the impact would be confined to the reaping, when everyone gathered in public” (379). Even Sejanus recognizes that Dr. Gaul speaks of the war “[a]s if it had been some big show” (343). The performative aspect of the Games upon which both Coriolanus and Lucy Gray capitalize is inextricably linked to Dr. Gaul’s vision for their power.
In Chapter 23, Coriolanus has his first encounter with jabberjays and their hybrid offspring, mockingjays—animals associated with death and disruption. The birds echo the hanged man, reminding Coriolanus of Lucy Gray’s “The show’s not over until the mockingjay sings” (352). Yet, he voices distaste for Covey old tunes with their “complicated harmonies” and unnerving sounds: “He sat through at least three songs of this kind before he realized it reminded him of the mockingjays” (365). The association between the Covey—synonymous with a flock—and the mockingjay, especially for readers of the original trilogy, foreshadows Coriolanus and Lucy Gray’s doomed relationship. Coriolanus’s love is tainted by jealousy as Lucy Gray is “His girl. His love. His Lucy Gray” (344). She is “his love” only insofar as she remains an object of desire with no agency of her own.
By Suzanne Collins