Coriolanus Snow: The Hanged Man
I still have yet to read Sunrise on the Reaping (hopefully this week). Instead, I'm going to fulfill my promise in this answer and write about Coriolanus Snow, because The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is, in my opinion, the most ambitious and successful narratively of The Hunger Games novels, and I constantly see people reducing the narrative from its tremendous nuance and complexity to a simple moral tale of "you can't fix him, silly girl" and/or "manic pixie dream girls aren't real."
Thinking Snow was a narcissist or born bad from birth misses the entire point of the novel. Thinking that he didn't really love Lucy Gray also misses the point. The point is that he did love Lucy Gray, and he still turned into a narcissistic villain because he has the freedom to make his own choices, and he makes all the wrong ones.
Sorry, Suzanne Collins likes love stories. She's going to keep writing love stories, because the love subplots play integral roles in the themes of both prequels and the main trilogy of The Hunger Games. They're part of the thematic point of each story, and while I do think you can make an argument that Gale's entanglement with Katniss is weaker than Katniss and Peeta, Lenore and Haymitch, and yes, even Lucy Gray and Coriolanus, you can't really argue that the romance is a "distraction" from the main themes and actually have a good understanding of the novels. Love is not extraneous to these books; it holds them together.
So, yes. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a love story. It just doesn't end happily ever after. See, Eren and Mikasa in Shingeki no Kyojin, or Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Not all love stories end well! Not all tragedies are romantic tragedies like Titanic or Romeo and Juliet! Sometimes love doesn't have so clear a role in saving the day--but it could have, and that itself is the tragedy.
Sejanus: Wounded Sons Bearing Sins of the Father
Yes, Coriolanus is self-focused and self-centered. He is constantly thinking of how certain aspects can benefit himself, how he can restore his family's name and honor, how he can end up on top. He clearly feels the tear between a mother who died in childbirth and a father who had high expectations, but whom Coryo can barely remember.
However, I'd argue that as portrayed in the novel until the last quarter of the story, Coryo's self-centeredness is not a sign of narcissism so much as it is a realistic portrayal of a traumatized child.
You see, children are by nature egocentric, and Collins portrays this well in her books. They don't understand that the world is greater than what exists in their mind, and grow to understand it more. Coryo is stuck in one place (the Capitol), starved, loses both his parents, and understandably, doesn't really see outside of his own perspective until he meets Lucy Gray.
This marks his chance to open his mind. Coryo actually gets an Empathy 101 course from the story: he rides in the filthy car with the tributes, gets dumped unceremoniously into the zoo, and then gets sent into the arena. The story repeatedly challenges him to open up his mind, and he starts to do so, only to fold back in on himself at the end.
But what if I told you that Coryo is at least on equal standing in terms of self-centeredness and only thinking about how he feels with another significant character (who also is working through trauma and the burdens placed by a father). Yes, I'm talking about Sejanus Plinth.
But wait, Sejanus wanted to stop the Hunger Games!
Yes, he did. He went about it in the most immature way that ultimately just harmed everyone around him. Marcus, whom Sejanus didn't fully empathize with. His own parents and Coriolanus, who almost got killed when he's forced into the arena to save him. Coriolanus kills Bobbin doing so, and is traumatized by it. The girl locked up. Sejanus doesn't think his plans through.
He's not a bad person. His goals are noble, righteous even. But he, like every young activist ever, doesn't fully comprehend the effect his actions have on others, doesn't comprehend that good intentions don't justify the means, and that a righteous cause doesn't mean innocents can't get hurt through it. And while it sounds like I'm being harsh on Sejanus, these ideas are all thoroughly explored in the main trilogy, so I'm guessing Collins was very aware of this and Sejanus is intentionally a parallel to Coriolanus.
Actually, Sejanus isn't just a parallel. He symbolizes a part of Coryo, the heart to his wisdom. If they'd combined forces, they could have changed the world.
I'd also argue that people who think Coriolanus never cared about Sejanus are misreading to the same level as people who think Katniss never really cared about Peeta. They aren't reliable narrators. Coriolanus looks at him with a certain disdain, yes. But that's because he's uncomfortable looking at his child self, being vulnerable, traumatized, humiliated, and poor. Yet Coryo warns him over and over again when he doesn't have to.
But that's wanting control!
Well, yes. Where do you think pathological needs for control come from? Often, it originally starts as genuine concern from a traumatized person who has had very little control in their lives and has no idea how to express it as concern.
Sejanus is also, in Jungian terms, Coriolanus's inner child. Sejanus is constantly focused on his childhood and outspoken about it, while Coryo is actually the same way but not outspoken about it. He represents the trauma of war, the difficulty relating to parents (even though Sejanus has parents, and Coryo does not), the desperation to both grow up and find one's own identity, stand up for what you believe in, and to please the parents who gave you life.
So when Coryo eventually turns Sejanus in, he in essence dooms himself, though he naively doesn't think this will happen. He--rather childishly--assumes that Sejanus will just be in trouble but that his daddy can bail him out. After all, that's what's always happened before. His parents are powerful. He even writes to Sejanus's parents asking them to help.
Except, at some point your parents can't save you. I do read Coryo's trauma after Sejanus's hanging as genuine--he vomits and clearly feels guilt. He wanted a parent to rescue him, but none can.
Even as Sejanus dies, he cries "Ma, Ma, Ma!" for his mother. The tragedy is that by killing Sejanus, narratively, Coryo ensures that he will never allow this wounded child within himself to grow up. The loss of his parents will never heal.
Coryo ending up being essentially "adopted" by Sejanus's parents who completely miss his role in their son's death symbolizes him not growing up, because he cannot ever be really honest with them. He's not integrating with Sejanus and becoming more himself; he's lost his identity. He gets parents, but they're a lie, and he'll never experience the love and comfort of parents that he's craved.
He also then carries out his father's legacy of the Hunger Games, trying to please a ghost rather than real people around him. He chooses the dead, not the living.
Dr. Gaul and Casca Highbottom: Fear
Fear is the opposite of love.
This idea is Biblical and also pretty much embodied by the philosophy of Dr. Gaul, the woman Coriolanus hates, is absolutely terrified of, but becomes just like. It's no coincidence that Lucy Gray and Dr. Gaul are constantly pitted as opposites in Coriolanus's mind, because they represent his two potential paths in life.
Dean Highbottom traced the silver rose on the compact with a finger. “So, what did she say when you told her you were leaving?”
“Dr. Gaul?” Snow asked.
“Your little songbird,” the dean said. “When you left Twelve. Was she sad to see you go?”
Dr. Gaul is actually a manipulative abuser. She isolates Coriolanus from his friends by strategically alienating him from Clemensia. She sends him into the arena to save Sejanus, reinforcing to him that she has total control over his life. She, like Highbottom, knows the truth of his family situation and exploits it.
She thrives on chaos and cruelty, using the fear of her students, and Coriolanus's particular fear of her, to create a bond and further her own malicious aims.
The irony is that Coriolanus is capable of cruelty and manipulation. We know this not just from the original trilogy, but from his whole persona in the story. Dr. Volumnia Gaul is Coriolanus's Jungian shadow, the part of ourselves we try to repress and deny.
However, the only way to healthily handle the shadow is to accept it. Coriolanus instead murders it and thus it consumes him. In the end, Coriolanus becomes most like the person he fears most: Dr. Gaul. It's a tragically childish way of protecting oneself.
You see, I said murders because Dr. Gaul isn't his only shadow. The other shadows are present in Casca Highbottom and in Coriolanus's own father, whose shadow Coriolanus is constantly trying to live up to.
He doesn't understand Highbottom's hatred of him, which is a projection of his inability to understand his father's loss as a child. He tries and tries to embody whom he thinks his father would like him to become, and he tries and tries to win Highbottom over. When Highbottom comments about Arachne's funeral being over the top, Coryo assumes he's actually trying to bond with him, and admits he felt the same way--a lowering of the guard. Instead, Highbottom informs him that he's just like his father, using that one moment of vulnerability to tell Coriolanus he's a bad person.
“My condolences on the loss of your friend,” the dean said.
“And on your student. It’s a difficult day for all of us. But the procession was very moving,” Coriolanus replied.
“Did you think so? I found it excessive and in poor taste,” said Dean Highbottom. Taken by surprise, Coriolanus let out a short laugh before he recovered and tried to look shocked. The dean dropped his gaze to Coriolanus’s blue rosebud. “It’s amazing, how little things change. After all the killing. After all the agonized promises to remember the cost. After all of that, I can’t distinguish the bud from the blossom.” He gave the rose a tap with his forefinger...
The irony is that Highbottom ends up creating a tragedy of his own. In assuming Coriolanus is just like his father, he helps shape Coriolanus into becoming exactly just like his father. He reinforces to Coriolanus that he can't trust others. When Coriolanus murders Highbottom via his addiction (something he can't be free from), he allows his shadow to consume him.
Our assumptions about people shape who they become. This is at the core of the novel's themes, but it's also countered by Lucy Gray and her internal freedom.
Lucy Gray: Performance and Freedom
If Sejanus is Coryo's inner child and Highbottom/Dr. Gaul are his shadows, then Lucy Gray is his anima, in Jungian terms. Anima literally means "soul," and Lucy Gray does symbolize his soul (symbolism isn't literal--she was her own person, and that's part of Coriolanus's downfall: that he can't accept that).
Lucy Gray starts off the series as a child singing as she's dragged away to die, and in her Coryo sees himself. Him greeting her with a rose is a symbol of him acting like his own mother (as the roses are associated with her--the powder tin, etc), and him entering the truck and then being unceremoniously dumped into the zoo is not only a chance to empathize with Lucy Gray (which he actually does), but to see his own circumstances from a new perspective.
Being a "Snow" isn't a gift even if it seems like it is. It's a prison, and more than that, it's a zoo. People gawk at him because of his name, but in reality he's starving and desperate to survive even after the war. Him being locked in there and then seeing what Lucy Gray endures at the zoo is him being given the chance to look at his own circumstances as a child locked away in the Capitol and starving.
Coriolanus sitting and eating with Lucy Gray as an equal is a sign of maturity, and so is his determination to sneak her food and keep her alive. Yes, it's a bit egocentric in a childish sense, but he's literally a teenager.
While Coriolanus will later lose himself to the fear that Lucy Gray is just performing in her relationship with him because it would save her life (and I've read some interpretations agreeing with this, which I don't think the book supports at all), the irony is that Coriolanus Snow is performing too. Every action he takes he thinks about how it will appear--and that's not just with Lucy Gray and his role as a mentor in the Hunger Games. He's stuck performing too.
Both Lucy Gray and Coriolanus are both performers, and more than that, they have to play the role the Capitol gives them. The Capitol says Lucy Gray is District 12 and has to die for that, but Lucy Gray is actually Covey and never participated in the war. Coriolanus is a Snow and that commands respect and expectations, yet his family is actually still starving and on the verge of eviction. Neither neatly fit in the roles the Capitol declares they are based on heritage and setting, but they have to endure the expectations and burdens of those roles nonetheless.
However, Lucy Gray finds freedom in performing her songs and culture. Performing doesn't equate to fake, and once you strip the layers of someone, you can trust them even in their performances.
Coriolanus also faces a way to use his background and performance to help, and he does use it to save Lucy Gray in the arena. He also has multiple options of which Snow he wants to become: his mother. Tigris. Grandmama. Or, his father, the one he actually thinks about the least until the end.
It's Lucy Gray's free spirit, the way she turns her prisons and performances into art, that draws Coriolanus in. Yes, when he kisses her at first he does think of her in a jealous, possessive way. Given his background and given that he's a teenager, that's not abnormal. He's been trapped in one city his whole life.
So when Coriolanus is sent to District 12, he symbolically has the chance for freedom, too. He could choose to open his mind in the districts, to freedom. He has a chance.
Sadly, he hangs, lies to, and then shoots his chance.
So, anima has four stages.
Helen (romantic interest)
Mary (religious devotion)
Sophia (wisdom, guide to the inner life)
In the beginning of Coriolanus's relationship with Lucy Gray, he associates her with his mother (the rose, the compact). He even gives her his mother's scarf (yes, there's some Oedipal imagery). Highbottom even calls it out:
“Your pretty, vapid mother, who’d somehow convinced herself that your father would give her freedom and love. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say.”
“She wasn’t” was all Coriolanus managed. Vapid, he meant.
“Only her youth excused her, and, really, she seemed fated to be a child forever. Just the opposite of your girl, Lucy Gray. Sixteen going on thirty-five."
Then he goes on to see her as someone he's pursuing romantically... and then he loses himself when given the chance to explore the religious devotion (so never approaches a wisdom phase).
See, as Coriolanus and Lucy meet up to flee, this happens:
“It’d be nice, in my new life, not to have to kill anyone else.”
“I’m with you there. Three seems enough for one lifetime. And certainly enough for one summer."
...
“Can you get this out?” He held out his hand, wiggling the compromised fingernail, hoping to distract her.
“Let me see.” She examined his splinter. “So, Bobbin, Mayfair . . . who’s the third?”
His mind raced for a plausible explanation. Could he have been involved in a freak accident? A training death? He was cleaning a weapon, and it went off by mistake? He decided it was best to make a joke of it. “Myself. I killed the old me so I could come with you.”
She plucked the splinter free. “There. Well, I hope old you doesn’t haunt new you. We’ve already got enough ghosts between us.”
The moment passed, but it had killed the conversation.”
Lucy Gray offers him the chance to confess. To trust her with the worst parts of himself. To truly be free.
And he lies, and in the end she removes the splinter like a mother removing one from a child, not as a person forgiving and setting another free.
The moment Coriolanus killed his future as a healthy, healing adult, was when he didn't take responsibility for Sejanus, when he says he killed himself. The irony is that this sentence itself kills Coriolanus''s development. It kills Lucy Gray's ability to trust him.
Coriolanus then embodies the lyrics of "The Hanging Tree."
They strung up a man
They say who murdered three
He murdered three, and has strung himself up.
Are you, are you
Coming to the tree?
Where I told you to run
So we'd both be free
He's fleeing with Lucy Gray, aiming to be free together.
Are you, are you
Coming to the tree?
Wear a necklace of rope/hope
Side by side with me
In the books, it's "rope;" the films turned it to "hope," and Collins would have known about this by the time of writing this book. Hence, the scarf Coriolanus gave Lucy Gray that she leaves for him to find, and that this is the section of the song the mockingjays sing when he's hunting for Lucy Gray in the ending.
They are both hanged men, and him more so than her. Yes, Lucy Gray is never able to leave the arena, still afraid that everyone is trying to kill her, but she still has a sense of self. And Coriolanus, being part of the Capitol, is partly to blame for this.
Worse, Coryo lost his sense of self. He sees a snake and assumes she's trying to kill him, but it wasn't venomous, and the reader pointedly never knows whether it was deliberate or not.
Because Coriolanus cannot control Lucy Gray. She has herself, and she's chosen to be free. He can shoot up her sanctuary and make the rest of the world pay for his own mistakes, but he can never control her.
In the end, Coriolanus becomes both his parents. His better nature, his chance to grow and have freedom and love, his chance to live a new life, dies at the very moment he could have given birth to it. And he becomes a cruel, calculating war criminal.
And in the end, The Hunger Games as a series reinforces its main theme: hurting children forced to hurt children because the adults around them had petty conflicts.
