The Girl Who Was on Fire Read Online Free PDF

one thing that matters to her more.
    Katniss comments in Catching Fire that if she had been older when her father died, she might well have ended up prostituting herself to the Peacekeepers to keep Prim fed. During the Quarter Quell, she goes in with the full intention of dying, so that Peeta might live. Neither of those actions is the work of a girl with a cold heart and a Machiavellian approach to survival. Katniss throws herself in front of bullets as often as she dodges them—because she would rather die for the people she loves than see them hurt.

Daughter, Sister, Mother, Friend
    If anyone doubts that Katniss is more driven by family than anything else—including romance—all you have to do is look at the role that Prim plays in almost every major turning point in the series. For a character who exists primarily off-screen, she’s instrumental in nearly everything Katniss does. She’s the impetus for Katniss volunteering for the Games. In Catching Fire , she’s the reason Katniss considers taking to the woods and the reason she decides not to—if her job is to protect Prim, she’s already failed, because the Capitol has been hurting her little sister since the day she was born. In Mockingjay , Prim is the first one who spells out for Katniss exactly how much power she has as the Mockingjay, and Prim’s death kicks off
the final act of the book, cutting off one vertex of the Katniss/ Peeta/Gale love triangle as viciously as a bomb can blow off a leg. Prim is the first character, other than Katniss, to appear in the books, and Katniss’ very first action on the very first page is to reach for her and come up empty-handed.
    If that’s not foreshadowing, I don’t know what is.
    But although Katniss identifies Prim as “the only person in the world I’m certain I love” ( Hunger Games ), throughout the course of the series, we see Katniss taking other people into her heart.
    Adopting them.
    Making them family.
    The most of obvious case of this is Rue. Katniss takes her in, casts her in Prim’s role, tries to protect her and fails. Rue’s death, more even than the promise Katniss made to Prim, is what drives our heroine to devote herself to winning the Games—because the only way to make Rue’s death mean something, to make her unforgettable, is “by winning and thereby making [herself] unforgettable.” In the span of less than twenty-four hours, Katniss lets Rue past all of her shields. She trusts her. She makes her family.
    And then Rue dies.
    While the little girl from District 11 is the only one, other than Prim, who gets the word “love” out of Katniss in that first book, even if it is in the lyrics of a song, this isn’t a pattern that holds up for long. Throughout the series, we see Katniss bringing more and more people into her fold: Peeta and Haymitch, Mags, Johanna and Finnick, Cinna. As focused as Katniss is on her own family, and as much as she tries to “protect” herself from letting other people in, the number of people the Capitol can use to hurt her just keeps growing and growing. The number of people Katniss feels she must protect keeps getting bigger and bigger.

    And the number of times she will inevitably fail becomes innumerable.

The End
    Katniss is a survivor, and she’s a protector. She’s a person who creates family everywhere she goes and a person who loves fiercely—but she lives in a brutal world, a world in which she cannot protect the ones she loves, a world in which survival—and living without her loved ones—is more of a curse than it is a blessing.
    I would like to argue that this—and not any kind of romantic decision—is what makes Katniss Everdeen the person we see at the series’ end . Her drive and ability to survive and her fierce love of the family she’s made are the traits that account for every single moment named in Mockingjay when Haymitch asks people to talk about times when they were personally affected by Katniss’ actions. Ultimately, even