The Girl Who Was on Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

she cries, to
love her. Other than the fact that Buttercup’s a great hunter and has a less-than-approachable personality, his two most defining characteristics are that he survives things a cat has no business surviving and that he loves Prim.
    Sound familiar?
    Throughout the trilogy, these same two characteristics are the ones that drive Katniss’ actions the most. She is focused, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, on finding a way to survive and protecting the people she considers family so that they may do the same. The importance Katniss puts on survival and family seems obvious, not just to us as readers, but to the handful of people who actually know Katniss. Peeta and Gale agree that Katniss will ultimately choose whoever she can’t survive without, and even President Snow hits the nail on the head, saying, “Any girl who goes to such lengths to preserve her life isn’t going to be interested in throwing it away” ( Catching Fire ). Significantly, however, President Snow doesn’t end his appraisal of Katniss with that statement about her will to survive; in a threatening tone, he adds on, “And then there’s her family to think of,” pinpointing her second major priority as well. Katniss is a survivor, and she lives to protect those she loves. Snow knows exactly how to threaten her, because—like the rest of the major players in the series—he knows exactly what our heroine’s priorities are.
    But what is significantly less obvious—and what I think accounts for many of the character developments we see in Mockingjay (and the fact that Katniss fails to go suddenly Buffy and start kicking ass left and right)—is the fact that together, these two driving forces—the ability to survive and an intense love for people who might not—can only lead one place when you put Katniss in any kind of war. Suffice to say, it’s not a happy place, and to really understand it—and the girl—you have to
take a step back and think about how Katniss views family and what it means to her to survive.

Survivor
    For Katniss, the name of the game has always been survival. At the age of eleven, with her father dead and her mother falling to pieces, Katniss had to make a choice, and she chose to set aside her own grief and fight for her family and for herself. To Katniss, whose mother “went away” and became an emotional invalid after her father’s death, this must have seemed like an either/or situation: you can either grieve for your lost loved ones or you can plow on; you can love and risk being decimated, or you can survive.
    It’s little wonder, then, that in Katniss’ mind romance was something she “never had the time or use for” ( Hunger Games ) and that when circumstances forced her to start thinking of love, it was always, always tied in her mind to survival. When Gale asks Katniss to go away with him at the beginning of the first book, she turns him down and only later begins to wonder whether the invitation was a practical means of increasing their chances of survival or whether it was something more. Shortly thereafter, when comparing her feelings about Peeta to her feelings about Gale, Katniss explicitly ties romance and survival together, saying, “Gale and I were thrown together by a mutual need to survive. Peeta and I know the other’s survival means our death. How do you sidestep that?”
    Romance and survival, survival and romance.
    For Katniss, they have always gone hand in hand. And yet, when she overhears Gale telling Peeta that her romantic choice will ultimately come down to who she can’t survive without,
Katniss is completely thrown and hurt that Gale sees her as being so cold and passionless. She wonders if Gale is right, and if that makes her selfish or less of a person—but what Katniss not-so-shockingly doesn’t seem to realize about herself is that she absolutely, one hundred percent isn’t the kind of person who prizes her survival above all else.
    There is at least