Compassion, Callousness, and Revenge Theme Analysis

In Mockingjay, even more overtly than in Catching Fire or The Hunger Games, Collins writes about the conflict between compassion and callousness, or, in a slightly different sense, between forgiveness and revenge.

The rebel alliance headed by President Coin commits numerous war crimes in its haste to defeat the government of President Snow: it bombs civilians, imprisons its own people, and even commits atrocities that it then tries to pin on Snow. At many times, the only moral justification that the characters supply for such acts is revenge. When the rebels are debating whether or not to bomb District 2, Gale argues that government already blew up District 12—therefore, the rebels are justified in responding in kind.

The moral problem with Gale and the rebels’ “eye-for-an-eye” philosophy, however, is that immoral actions always lead to more immoral actions: one war crime must always be balanced out with another. Katniss Everdeen struggles with the “eye-for-an-eye” philosophy throughout Mockingjay. As a result of her experiences in the Hunger Games and in battle, she’s lost much of her compassion for others—indeed, she seriously contemplates killing Peeta, one her closest friends, because he could compromise the success of her mission. Katniss craves revenge—the ultimate “eye-for-an-eye”—against President Snow: she wants to kill him because he killed her friends and blew up her home, District 12. Violence and bloodshed have trained Katniss to think in terms of revenge—that every act of violence must be responded to with another act of violence.

At the end of the novel, Katniss is in an ideal position to enact her revenge on Snow: she’s supposed to shoot him with an arrow, watched by millions of eager spectators. To everyone’s surprise, however, Katniss instead shoots President Alma Coin, the power-hungry leader of the rebel alliance. Katniss gives up her chance for personal revenge, favoring instead an ideal of justice that resists the sort of ultimate power Coin seeks to hold. Similarly, she refuses to support a further installment of the Hunger Games, Games which would be designed to “balance out” the government’s abuse of the districts of Panem.

Katniss ultimately recognizes that injustice can’t be canceled out with more injustice. Shooting Snow or supporting a new Hunger Games won’t relieve her of the sadness of losing her family and friends in battle, or of having to compete in the original Hunger Games. Even after Snow died, her pain and trauma would remain intact—there is, in short, no “quick fix” for injustice.

This certainly doesn’t mean that Katniss forgives Snow for his war crimes, or that she renounces violence altogether (quite the contrary, since she shoots Coin—who is, in her opinion, an equally evil leader). Rather, it suggests that Katniss has recognized the limitations of the “eye-for-an-eye” doctrine, and has rejected the moral callousness her friend Gale has acquired during the war. Implicitly, she trades callousness for compassion, or at least the promise of compassion. In the epilogue to the novel, set 20 years later, we see Katniss playing with her children and embracing her husband, Peeta. Revenge and moral callousness are seductive solutions to the world’s evils, Collins concludes, but in the end they’re always unsatisfying. The better, and much more challenging, solution is to embrace love and compassion.