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Summary
Chapter 14
When Sejanus realizes what he’s seeing with Marcus onscreen, he screams abuse at the silent room, throws a chair at the TV, and runs out into the hall. The screen cuts back to the presenter, Lucky, who cheerfully reminds people that they can bet on the outcome if they wish. As the starting gong sounds, the tributes begin to scatter across the arena. Coriolanus focuses on Lucy, hoping she will be safe and silently urging her to run and hide. The District 7 tribute Lamina shocks the arena by climbing up to Marcus and mercifully killing him. Pup, her mentor, proudly announces her as his tribute and encourages people to send her gifts. Aside from Reaper, the other tributes all remain in hiding for hours on end. The broadcast alternates between long periods of inactivity and short interviews with mentors. The day in the arena ends with little action, and Lucky interviews Dr. Gaul about how she plans to fix it. Gaul promises lots of brutal bloodshed to come and tells Lucky that people will have to wait and see what happens. The District 3 tributes Circ and Teslee emerge to scavenge for spare parts, and the tribute Dill, already fatally ill, dies of a combination of tuberculosis and exposure.
After the broadcast, Coriolanus returns home to find Mrs. Plinth, Sejanus Plinth's mother, in his apartment. She is terrified because Sejanus has not come home. Coriolanus tries to reassure her, but their attention snaps back to the screen showing the arena as a figure approaches the sleeping Lamina. Mrs. Plinth recognizes him instantly. It’s Sejanus. He’s in the arena.
Chapter 15
Coriolanus, the Grandma’am, Tigris, and Mrs Plinth watch as the screen shows Sejanus placing breadcrumbs on Marcus’s body, a custom from their shared home of District 2. Dr. Gaul, bursting with fury, calls Coriolanus and tells him to help retrieve Sejanus from the arena. Coriolanus and Mrs Plinth head to the stadium, where Coriolanus is equipped with body armor, pepper spray, and a flash unit. He asks for a weapon but is denied one: only the tributes are allowed help to kill each other. Dean Highbottom assures him that Peacekeepers will cover him with gunfire until he reaches the barricade. Nervously, Coriolanus sneaks through the barrier and into the arena.
In the arena, Coriolanus quickly finds Sejanus, who is unafraid for himself but worried for his family and friends. Sejanus says he plans to die on live TV in protest of the Games. Coriolanus says he understands what Sejanus is going for, but tells him there’s no way the Gamemakers will show an act of rebellion on TV. Instead, he reminds Sejanus that he could use his future wealth to help people, or to change things like the Hunger Games as an important member of the elite in the Capitol. Sejanus agrees reluctantly, but he won’t leave without Marcus’s body. The two boys pick the corpse up and try to carry it to the barricade. However, just as they are about to reach safety, the tribute Bobbin appears and attacks them with a knife.
Analysis
The scene where Marcus appears "so battered and bloody that Coriolanus thought they were displaying his corpse" is perhaps the most violent in this very violent novel. Hoisting a tortured child above the arena is an act of brutality unprecedented in the Hunger Games. Indeed, perpetrating an act of violence like this arguably goes against the ethos of the Games themselves. As is made clear several times in the novel, the point of the Hunger Games is to demonstrate the Capitol's power and the Districts’ weakness. If the Capitol just wanted to kill 24 of the Districts’ children, they could do so far more cheaply and efficiently than by staging an enormous nationwide event like the Hunger Games. However, in forcing children from the Districts to kill each other as a punishment for a rebellion in which they did not participate, the Capitol keeps its hands clean. While it is certainly responsible for the deaths of the children who fight and kill each other in the arena, there's no actual evidence of physical violence the Gamemakers have perpetrated with their own hands. Although this is a society that is based around public acts of violence, the Capitol doesn't like to be directly connected with violence, preferring to exact it through others. There’s always at least one degree of removal. Having the children kill each other also has the added benefit of reinforcing the Districts’ reputation for savagery amongst Capitol residents.
Another interesting aspect of this section is the way that it directly addresses the idea of the Games’ entertainment factor. At this early point in their development, the Gamemakers haven’t figured out how to make the Hunger Games into the public spectacle it later becomes. There are lots of boring bits in Games held in this arena, when tributes are resting or hiding or dying quietly. This version of the Hunger Games—unlike the highly technologically advanced one that Collins’s audiences might be familiar with from the original trilogy—also takes place in a large, unmoving outdoor space. There are no special mechanized sections that can force tributes in and out of hiding places or push them to get closer together so that the violence plays out quickly. The Capitol relies on the tributes' need to eat, drink, and sleep for the deaths to stack up. That means that in this version of the Hunger Games, there are long stretches where nothing interesting at all is happening on the screen.
In this section, the reader gets to see the difference in expectations that viewers have for the Games. The narrator tells the reader that one of the reasons the mentors suspect there is low viewership of the broadcasts is that the games are hard to watch: long periods of boredom and stillness are interspersed with short moments of incredibly graphic violence. Some people see the Games as entertainment, others as punishment, others as a brutal but necessary ceremony. Lucky Flickerman at one point asks Dr. Gaul when they can expect more action to begin, because nothing attention-worthy is happening when the tributes are just hiding in the tunnels or around the obstacles. People like Gaul and Dean Highbottom don't see the exciting public brutality as being the point of the Games. People like Lucky Flickerman want as much gore as possible, as fast as possible.
We also see a difference in viewpoints on the tributes when Sejanus forces his way into the arena, and Coriolanus is forced to go in after him. Sejanus is so distraught at the torture inflicted on Marcus that he resolves to kill himself on public TV in order to protest the Games. In doing so, he hasn't considered the fact that everything that's shown on the screen is done at the discretion of the Gamemakers. His sadness at Marcus’s death and his horror at the Capitol’s treatment of him blind him to the problems of his plan. However, because Coriolanus is always thinking ahead, he uses the fact that Sejanus's death might not even make it onto the TV as a way to persuade him to leave the arena. Sejanus’s humanity and compassion compared to Coriolanus's cold, selfish calculations is painfully apparent in this chapter. Even when faced with a tortured corpse and the high probability of his and Sejanus’s death, Coriolanus is thinking around corners.
