fire
Fire plays different roles throughout the story, but most often it represents Katniss. Notably, fire is the element that gives the various outfits Cinna designs for Katniss their character. Her first dress, for example, is covered in synthetic flames, while later outfits use fire more subtly but still maintain it as a motif. Katniss’s fire dress earns her the epithet “the girl who was on fire,” and this title comes to pertain to more than just her dress. After Katniss’s surprisingly high training score is announced, Haymitch explains that they must have liked her “heat.” Cinna calls her “the girl who was on fire” again, this time using “fire” to refer to Katniss’s spirit and temperament. During the Games, the phrase takes on a literal meaning after Katniss is struck in the leg by a fireball and thinks the Gamemakers must be laughing at “the girl who was on fire.”
mockingjay
The mockingjay represents defiance in the novel, with the bird’s symbolism deriving initially from its origins. The mockingjay, we learn, came about as a result of a failed project by the Capitol to spy on the rebellious districts, and since then the bird has served as a reminder of this failure and the districts’ recalcitrance—Katniss describes them as “something of a slap in the face to the Capitol.” The mockingjay pin Madge gives to Katniss is at first an emblem of that resistance. Later in the novel, however, the birds come to symbolize a different sort of defiance. Mockingjays become a link between Katniss and Rue, with the two using the birds to communicate. When Katniss later sees mockingjays, they remind her of Rue, and that memory inevitably stirs her hatred of the Capitol and her wish to rebel, and take revenge, against it. The mockingjay consequently takes on an additional layer of symbolism, representing not only a general rebellion against the Capitol, but also Katniss’s specific desire to defy it.
panem
Panem is the country in which The Hunger Games takes place, and it symbolizes a dystopian United States. The word panem is Latin for “bread,” and given the similarity of the Hunger Games to the gladiatorial Games of Ancient Rome, it recalls panem et circenses, or “bread and circuses.” This is a reference to the satiric Roman poet Juvenal’s comment on the society of Ancient Rome: all the populace wants is bread from the corn dole and the excitement of the bloodthirsty games of the amphitheatre. Juvenal suggested that by pandering to these needs one could journey up the political ladder with ease. The Roman Caesars’ strategy of quelling public discontent by providing the people with plenty of food and entertainment is paralleled as The Hunger Games. In the novel, these gladiatorial Games are crossed with reality television to create the Hunger Games.
But this is not simply a reflection of the similarity of attitudes between the people of the Capitol and the citizens of Ancient Rome. The country of Panem, with its districts all feeding and providing for the greedy and bourgeois inhabitants of the Capitol, is a clear allusion to the Roman Empire, and the rebellion and subsequent invasion of the Capitol by the districts echoes Rome’s fate. The title of the games is clever in that hunger has multiple interpretations – literal hunger for food, the hunger of the Capitol citizens for entertainment, and the hunger of the participants to survive at any cost.
But this is not simply a reflection of the similarity of attitudes between the people of the Capitol and the citizens of Ancient Rome. The country of Panem, with its districts all feeding and providing for the greedy and bourgeois inhabitants of the Capitol, is a clear allusion to the Roman Empire, and the rebellion and subsequent invasion of the Capitol by the districts echoes Rome’s fate. The title of the games is clever in that hunger has multiple interpretations – literal hunger for food, the hunger of the Capitol citizens for entertainment, and the hunger of the participants to survive at any cost.