Chicago Book Club

One of the unsatisfactory remarks about The Hunger Games that I’ve heard is that Katniss, the series main character, is not a very perceptive young woman (spoilers ahead). Before I touch on this at all, the enormous fan in me wants to shriek, “Oh really? With heroines like Bella Swan to look to for guidance, do you really think you can say Katniss is stupid? Seriously?” And then I’d probably wag my head around in some really embarrassing, early-90s bob of disbelief and outrage, perhaps snapping my fingers as an exclamation point.

We are also talking about a sixteen-year-old, folks. How many sixteen-year-olds do you know who are very perceptive at all, let alone the ones who’ve led extremely malnourished lives without the proper fats it takes for a baby’s brain to develop?

But the truth of the matter is that Katniss Everdeen is an incredibly perceptive teenager—in fact, I think she’s too perceptive. She interprets nearly everything—from Haymitch’s sponsor gifts in the arena to the movements of her fellow tributes, the actions of President Coin to the hints of President Snow—like a calculated game planner herself. And why wouldn’t she? She’s lived in fear her whole live, and she had to have the gumption to feed her own family when her mother was too depressed or sick to do it herself. And that’s the big reason why Katniss is no idiot, my friends.

Any person calling her such, I think, must not have known hunger. I have not known severe hunger like a child who dies from it, of course; but I do know poverty, and I do know what it’s like to grow up choosing to pay bills or eat. I grew up in a trailer park where we were on and off food stamps, my father was in and out of work due to layoffs in the carpentry business, and my sisters and I sometimes had change for lunch, sometimes not. When you are hungry—well, let me tell you. It’s really hard to think on an empty stomach. You are exhausted, tired, distracted, and hungry.

And if you’re poor in the Midwest, you also have pride, so you don’t beg or ask for food, and you don’t accept handouts because it means you’ll owe. I totally get Katniss on that one. You don’t even accept reduced lunch tickets because they’re another color, and people make fun of you for using them. So you might just skip a meal, maybe two, each day. Some days I gave my fifty cents to my sisters to use to ensure a full meal while I ate at my after-school job. Once I had a woman—someone who meant a lot to me, in fact, save for her holier than thou remarks—scoff that her children would never allow themselves to go hungry, as they were so resourceful, when she heard that I’d been eating only a meal a day; I had to roll my eyes; I was simply used to it.

Perhaps that had never occurred to her. I doubted that her children—who did things I’d never even known about, let alone dreamed of—could have switched places with me during those years easily. Where would they have found food in my neighborhood, under the age to work, far from any resource within walking distance? At one of the neightbor’s meth labs?

I am surprised that any tribute lasts through the Games without proper hydration or food; I am sure it’s sheer adrenaline keeping them pumping.

To say that Katniss is stupid to not realize she’s being used by her own side is a remark only a privileged person who’s never known regular hunger could make. If you know the feeling, than you might be able to guess that she’s simply in survivor mode, meeting whatever comes next as it comes without the luxury of thinking of very far into the future.