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Summary
Chapter 11
Lucy urges Coriolanus to help her win the Games, in order to repay his debt. The two agree to strategize together, and Coriolanus prepares her for a live, televised interview with the host of the Games, Lucky Flickerman. Peacekeepers lead the mentors away to the high biology lab, where Sejanus loses his temper at Dr. Gaul and Dean Highbottom for their cruelty. He’s silenced, and Dr. Gaul asks them to write an essay on everything they love about war. Coriolanus leaves to search for a guitar, in the hopes that Lucy can play it on TV. Over the next few days, Lucy frantically practices for the interview, coached by Coriolanus. When the interview begins and Lucy begins to play, Coriolanus realizes she’s playing a grim original song about her own death. The performance goes off perfectly, and he knows he should be happy, but instead he’s jealous of all the attention Lucy is getting.
Chapter 12
In the Capitol, everyone assumes Lucy Gray belongs to Coriolanus. The song she sings references a past lover, and it makes him feel insecure. He’s even more worried when Lucy implies that it might contains a secret message for the Covey. The suggestion that she has a lover back in District 12 and allies outside the Capitol destabilizes his sense of power over her. Coriolanus and Tigris walk home together, and she calls him out for being judgmental of the other mentors. When they get home, they try to think of the things that they liked about the war. Coriolanus writes his essay about a turkey he and Tigris caught one holiday and about a life without fear, but he is too embarrassed to read the last part aloud in class. He lies awake the night after worrying about saying goodbye to Lucy in the arena, and about their approaching final meeting before the Hunger Games begin. The next day, Lucy expresses her terror about the upcoming battle. In an attempt to comfort her, Coriolanus offers her his mother's silver compact, for luck. She protests, but he subtly implies that she can fill it with rat poison from the monkey cage. She immediately takes it.
Chapter 13
Lucy is very moved by the gift and Coriolanus’s compassion. As she gets up to leave for the arena, she kisses him sweetly on the mouth. He’s smitten, but she’s pulled away by Peacekeepers. He intends to keep the kiss secret, but he ends up telling Tigris about it that night. He’s unsure about what he feels, acknowledging his limited experience with romance because of having to keep the Snow family’s poverty a secret. He goes to sleep dreaming of Lucy, but when he arrives at the arena for the start of the Games the next morning, Dr. Gaul, and Dean Highbottom meanly tease him about the kiss. Shaking this off, Coriolanus participates in a pre-Games television interview. He emphasizes that as a Covey member, Lucy is not really from District 12. He wants people to believe she’s more like a Capitol child than a District girl. He and the other mentors go under the arena for final preparations, and he has emotional confrontations with Lysistrata about Jessup, and then with Clemensia about his lack of support while she was hospitalized. The beginning of the Games is called out on the TV, but the camera doesn’t focus on the arena. Instead, it zooms in to Marcus, who has been captured and tortured, manacled to a steel structure.
Analysis
In Section 4, the theme of survival comes to the fore when Lucy lays out her requirement for her mentor to believe she can stay alive until the end of the Games. When Lucy and Coriolanus sit in the cafeteria together, Coriolanus is expecting to have a confrontation where she demands that he repay her for saving his life. Instead of doing this, Lucy thanks him for saving hers. There's a moment of awkward compassion between them, which Coriolanus doesn’t expect. Lucy is more prepared, however. She mobilizes this tender moment, telling him that the best way to repay her is by taking her seriously as a candidate to win the Games. Instead of just hoping that her own charisma and ability to press people’s emotional buttons will get her what she wants, she explicitly states her needs to Coriolanus. The bombing in the arena has made her highly aware that her death could be fast approaching. She knows that in order to survive, she needs to do everything she can and use every scrap of her resources. This involves telling Coriolanus that she thinks she could win. She’s not big, strong, or tough, but she can make people love her.
Right from the beginning, however, the reader can draw a link between Lucy’s talents and her practical preoccupation with survival. When she was introduced at the Reaping, her behavior was very unusual for a tribute from the downtrodden and impoverished District 12. Her festive dress, her singing, and the way that she directly addressed the audience of the games made her stand out as someone not to be dismissed. She knows that her greatest strength isn't physical power. Rather, it lies in her ability to make people feel intense emotions and to make them sympathetic to her. Whether or not her feelings for Coriolanus are an act, she knows that she can use this power to help herself. The fact that after this interaction Coriolanus spends the better part of the day searching for a suitable guitar for her to play on TV only speaks to her effectiveness at manipulation. While it seems that people from the Capitol are generally uncomfortable with feeling an emotional connection to the tributes, Lucy's universal appeal begins to humanize the District children. This has the unwanted effect of making people like Dr. Gaul think about the monetary and political value of introducing compassion to the games, as does Sejanus’s emotional response to the cruelty he sees. Marcus’s torture is harder to witness when one thinks of a tribute as a person instead of as disposable. Liking Lucy also makes things more difficult for the mentors and Gamemakers, who are directly involved in her potential death.
Even though Coriolanus is already reasonably smitten with Lucy by this point in the novel, he's still self-aware enough, and selfish enough, to feel extreme jealousy when she publicly succeeds. As a person who wants to one day rule Panem as its tyrannical President, Coriolanus struggles with anybody else being in the limelight. Even though he knows that Lucy’s star power and her ability to generate attention is what might win the games for her—and what might secure him the university spot that he's so desperate to get—it’s still difficult for him to accept.
Coriolanus's insecurities about Lucy's feelings for an unknown person in District 12 also speak to the narrowness of his worldview. Even though he knows that there is an extremely strong chance that Lucy will never leave the arena once she enters, he is fiercely jealous of the lover that she alludes to in the songs she sings. He feels far more comfortable with his relationship with Lucy when his sense of power over her remains unquestioned. The idea that she would have an alternative allegiance to somebody in a place that isn't the Capitol makes him feel very insecure about his own ability to captivate women's interests.
