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When word had gotten out that he’d come from the districts, Coriolanus’s first impulse had been to join his classmates’ campaign to make the new kid’s life a living hell. On further reflection, he’d ignored him. If the other Capitol children took this to mean that baiting the district brat was beneath him, Sejanus took it as decency. Neither take was quite accurate, but both reinforced the image of Coriolanus as a class act.
This passage from the novel’s first chapter describes Coriolanus’s early relationship with Sejanus Plinth. In addition to pointing out Coriolanus’s superiority complex, it generally illustrates the attitude of disdain held by Capitol children towards those from less privileged backgrounds. Even though Sejanus’s father is as rich as any of theirs, because his family came from District 2 the Capitol people see him as inferior. They’re frightened of “new money” and the implication that people from the Districts can elevate their status through wealth, so they decide to make Sejanus’s life miserable.
By ignoring Sejanus, Coriolanus chooses not to pick a side, something the reader will soon come to learn is typical for him. Coriolanus is neither the cruel tormentor his classmates might admire nor the decent, forbearing person Sejanus believes him to be. He is simply motivated by self-interest and the preservation of his image.
Throughout the war and the decade that followed, the family had been forced to sell or trade many of its possessions, so that some rooms were entirely empty and closed off and the others sparsely furnished at best. But better off sad than dead.
This passage from Chapter 1 conveys the stark, chilly reality of the Snow family's post-war existence. After all the deaths and losses their family has suffered, by the time the novel begins they are virtually impoverished. They have nothing left except for their few remaining household treasures, Coriolanus’s star power, and Tigris’s limited marketable skills with a needle. Tigris, the Grandma’am, and Coriolanus are forced into selling or trading possessions until entire rooms in their home are empty. The imagery of emptiness and sparse furnishings in the apartment physically represents how Coriolanus feels: like the apartment he looks grand on the outside, but on the inside, he’s barely hanging on.
The phrase "But better off sad than dead" reads like something that Coriolanus has heard or said several times. Just like “Snow always lands on top,” it’s a maxim intended to help process difficult feelings. Coriolanus regrets having to sell the family’s belongings but knows that material and emotional losses like these are sometimes the price of survival in wartime. He uses his diminished living situation and constant threat of starvation to fuel his ambition to succeed.
He imagined the two of them, the president and his first lady, presiding over the Hunger Games a few years from now. He’d continue the Games, of course, when he ruled Panem. People would call him a tyrant, ironfisted and cruel. But at least he would ensure survival for survival’s sake, giving them a chance to evolve.
This unnerving vision comes from the novel’s Epilogue, where Coriolanus has returned to the Capitol to find all his dreams coming true. His vision of presiding over the Games as President with a wife he does not love by his side is a far cry from his romantic vision of life with Lucy in the wilderness. By the time he becomes “Snow” instead of “Coriolanus,” he is socially untouchable because of the Plinth family’s wealth. He also believes himself to be as morally unimpeachable “as the driven snow” after years of learning about “the true nature of humanity” from Dr. Gaul. He’s absolutely certain he knows what’s best, even if it makes him seem like a tyrant in the eyes of the people of Panem.
Snow has convinced himself that the brutality of the Games is justified by the order they instill. This authoritarian style of reasoning lacks all compassion. It’s all just a rationalization that serves to keep power in the hands of those who already have it.
