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Summary
Chapter 30
Coriolanus thinks sadly that an elite officer’s school sounds like a great opportunity, but he believes that staying in District 2 would be far too dangerous, as he could become a suspect for Billy and Mayfair’s murders at any time. He goes to meet Lucy and finds her in the field, wearing the orange scarf. She asks him if they can head to the lake one more time, and he agrees. They talk on and off about the future as they make their way there, and Coriolanus struggles with whether going with Lucy is the right thing to do. He loves her, but he also loves himself, and the idea of military success is appealing. It begins to pour with rain and the two hurry to the only lake house that still has a roof. As Lucy builds a fire to cook the fish they’ve caught, Coriolanus sees a long burlap bag in the corner with something poking out of it. It’s the underground economy guns, including the weapon used to murder Mayfair and Billy. Lucy asks if they should take them, and Coriolanus realizes that he’s found an out. He hates the wilderness already, and if he gets rid of the gun, there’s no evidence tying him to the murder, and nothing to prevent him from going to officer’s school.
Lucy goes to forage for katniss roots, but takes a long time to come back. Coriolanus starts to get suspicious, finally realizing that she must know he turned in Sejanus. He runs into the woods to hunt her. He thinks he’s found her when he sees her orange scarf, but it’s a trap: as he bends over it, a snake bites his hand. He calls out to her in desperation, and she sings a stanza of the song “The Hanging Tree” to him, confirming she knows he got Sejanus killed. He’s briefly elated as he thinks he can track her, but the mockingjays pick up the song and make a cacophonous din in the trees. He can’t find her, and his arm is swelling around the bite. He reasons that she’ll probably head north without him, and he returns to base. The Dr. there tells him the bite wasn’t venomous and wishes him luck on his journey to District 2.
He gets on a train thinking he’ll be arriving in District 2, but he is woken up by an attendant and told he’s in the Capitol. Confused and disoriented, he is taken to Dr. Gaul at the Citadel. She tells him that she orchestrated his summer with the Peacekeepers as a learning experience. She has arranged for an honorable discharge for him and has planned for him to study under her guidance at the University in the Capitol. This turn of events comes as a surprise to Coriolanus, who was under the impression that his future lay in District 2. This not only rescues him from the immediate peril he faced in the wilderness, but also from any potential fallout from his actions in District 12.
Epilogue
In this passage, Coriolanus (or, as the narrator now calls him, Snow) exits the University Science Center in the Capitol on a beautiful October afternoon. He looks stunning in his new suit and his signature curls are flourishing once again. He has just completed a special honors class in military strategy with Dr. Gaul and spent the morning at the Citadel for his Gamemaker internship, where he is treated like a full member of the team already. The team is brainstorming ways to make the next Hunger Games more engaging for both the Districts and the Capitol. Snow suggests ideas to increase District involvement in the Games, such as rewarding the Victor's entire District with food and creating a special residential area called the Victor’s Village to create a sense of envy and glamor.
Snow has been made the de facto heir of the Plinth family after the loss of Sejanus. They don’t know that Coriolanus was responsible for Sejanus’s death, and they grateful to him for his kindness to their son. They now handle all expenses for Snow, Tigris, and the Grandma’am.
That evening, a dinner is planned to commemorate Sejanus's nineteenth birthday, with Snow inviting a few of Sejanus’s friends. He plans to give the Plinths a box containing Sejanus’s personal items. Before the dinner, Snow visits the Academy to confront Dean Highbottom about returning his mother’s silver compact. He gives Highbottom back Sejanus’s Academy diploma, and conspicuously throws away the morphling and medicine bottles Sejanus had hidden in Highbottom’s trash can.
Snow and Dean Highbottom discuss the origins of Highbottom’s hatred for Snow’s father. This turns out to be the story of the Hunger Games themselves. Highbottom reveals that he and Crassus Snow, who had been his best friend, created the Games as a theoretical project for a class with Dr. Gaul. Highbottom immediately regretted sharing the evil idea, but it was too late: Crassus Snow had shared it with Dr. Gaul. Highbottom expresses regret and disdain for the Games and tells Snow that his guilt at being involved is the reason he is addicted to morphling. He dismisses Snow.
After leaving the Academy, Snow muses to himself about Lucy Gray's fate, which remains a mystery. He dismisses any lingering feelings for her, reminding himself that she manipulated him. He will only marry someone who he has no feelings for whatsoever, so they can’t affect his choices. He envisions himself as a leader who will continue the Hunger Games, believing that survival is the utmost priority for humanity.
As the novel ends, Snow feels self-satisfied as he recalls how he secretly acquired rat poison from a back-alley trap and crumbled it into the morphling bottle, knowing that Highbottom would steal it from the trash. Coriolanus hopes that in his final moments, Highbottom will realize his cunning and ruthlessness. The novel ends with the family motto that Snow has repeated to himself his entire life: “Snow lands on top.”
Analysis
In this final section of the book, there's a long period where Coriolanus can't decide between prioritizing himself and his ambition or prioritizing his relationship with Lucy. Having decided that he's going to run away with Lucy, Coriolanus is then disoriented by the good news that keeps falling into his lap. He had reconciled himself to the life of a lowly, average Peacekeeper. Then, failing that, he had reconciled himself to the fact that he was going to be arrested for sedition, treason, or perhaps even murder. Instead of all this, he's receiving a series of commendations. The opportunity to go to the elite officer's school, especially as the youngest person to ever pass the exam, seems too good to pass up. This is all very well, but he knows that because the murder weapon is still out there, covered in his DNA, he'll never be safe if he stays. There are several points in this novel like this one, where Coriolanus sees the possibility of the future stretching in front of him, only to have it snatched away from him at the last moment.
Coriolanus is also forced to confront the reality of running away into the wilderness with Lucy. When it’s actually happening, it isn’t nearly as appealing as staying in peace and comfort in the more well-heeled District 2, or the Capitol itself. As he and Lucy walk through the forest, he thinks about the fact that he has no idea what is waiting for them on the other side of the border. He doesn't know if there is anyone there who can help them survive. He doesn't know where they will live, where they will sleep, or what they will eat. Although he's enjoyed swimming in the lake with Lucy and likes the attractive landscapes of some parts of District 12, he worries that the love he and Lucy share will not be enough to make him happy forever. When they arrive at the lake house and he sees that the bag of guns hidden behind the door contains the murder weapon, he's delighted. He realizes that if he gets rid of it, nothing is preventing him from staying and doing the officer training. The romantic ideal of a chaotic life with Lucy in the unknown North very quickly lost its shine when it started to feel real, and he's relieved to have an excuse to go back to the base.
When Coriolanus wakes up on the train expecting to be in District 2, but instead finds that he's being discharged at the Capitol, he realizes that everything he's done for the last year has actually been another complicated game by Dr. Gaul. Although he knows he should feel frightened by the level of her manipulation, he doesn't seem shaken at all when she reveals that she had orchestrated him being sent to Peacekeeper training. Anyone else might be angry or alarmed, but for Coriolanus, this all seems par for the course. This is perhaps because of the way that Dr. Gaul's conversations with him about human nature have shaped his ideas about control. To Coriolanus, it’s comforting to know that the entire time he thought he was in charge of his own destiny, he was in fact being controlled in a very specific way by the Capitol's head Gamemaker.
Coriolanus's circumstances have changed so drastically by the time the novel reaches its Epilogue that he even has a different name. Throughout the novel, his ambition has been focused on restoring the Snow family to their former glory, and returning his father's surname back to its original, exalted position. After all the events of his participation in the Games have finished, and he's back in the Capitol with Dr. Gaul, he has fully stepped into his role as the new and improved Coriolanus—only now, he's going by Snow. Notably, the fact that his name has changed isn't signaled by the narrator. They just begin to refer to him as Snow in this last chapter, as if the reader should understand it’s required. This has the effect of signaling the jump forward in time the story takes. This new Coriolanus with his shining curls and beautiful suit is an abrupt break from his Peacekeeper days. It's almost as if we are supposed to understand that we are reading about someone who's functionally a different person.
Here at the end of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it seems as though everything has worked out better than Snow could have ever dreamed. His family is amply taken care of because of the Plinth family's unofficial adoption of him, Tigris, and the Grandma’am. The Plinths have no idea that he betrayed Sejanus, and they welcome him into their home as a surrogate son. He's well on his way to becoming the next head Gamemaker, is taking honors classes in military strategy, and is at the forefront of policymaking for the next Hunger Games. He even seems to successfully get his revenge on the detested Dean Highbottom after Highbottom reveals that he and Snow's father, Crassus Snow, had come up with the original idea for the Hunger Games. It was a school project for Dr. Gaul, but Highbottom regretted coming up with the idea, and never forgave Coriolanus's father for passing on the report to Gaul.
While Coriolanus may believe that “Snow lands on top” at the end of the novel, from the outside, his situation doesn’t seem quite so rosy. He has lost everything that connected him to humanity. He has betrayed all of his friends, lost the love of his life, is a murderer many times over, and has helped commercialize the Hunger Games in a way that will make them more violent, brutal, and inhumane than ever. While this translates to success in the world of the Capitol, it's an enormous step away from the already tenuous morals that he tried to stick to at the beginning of the novel. His conversations with Dr. Gaul about the violent nature of humanity have made him believe that the ends always justify the means, regardless of the circumstances. He believes that as a leader who continues his father’s legacy, avoids letting love affect his decisions, and supports the Hunger Games, he’s playing a positive role in Panem’s battle against chaos.
