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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Ambition and the Price of Power
Ambition is the driving force for Coriolanus Snow in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. When the novel begins, the reader learns that Coriolanus is the first generation of his family to experience poverty. The Grandma'am and Tigris have no recourse for earning but also have no experience of a life without the trappings of wealth and power. Because Coriolanus has everything he needs to gain access to that world, he feels an unshakable need to make it happen. He wants to attain the wealth and power that he’s only pretending to have, and to open the doors of his crumbling apartment back up to high society. Although keeping up this pretense is important, it’s also almost impossible and means he’s constantly living on an anxious edge. His determination to reclaim his family's lost glory fuels his manipulation of everyone around him. This applies to his friends, his professors, and especially Lucy Gray Baird when he is assigned to mentor her during the Hunger Games. Coriolanus knows that given the right circumstances, he can truly fake it until he makes it. This pushes him to exploit everyone around him for personal gain, and in doing so, to gradually lose all sense of what a kind or selfless act looks like. He climbs the social ladder on this foundation of ruthlessness, which he relentlessly justifies to himself as necessary for his survival. Yet, the novel exposes the hollowness of this ambition, and of the desire for power in general. In a violent society like Panem, Coriolanus believes that the only way to gain power is through a combination of cultivating fear and collecting extreme wealth.
Every character in this novel has a relationship with ambition and its complicated price: for example, Lucy Gray Baird also desperately wants to achieve a goal. However, her ambition takes on a completely justifiable target: the only power that she truly wants to regain in this novel is the power to survive. As a tribute who is reaped from District 12, she loses all autonomy over her own body unless she succeeds in winning the Games. She exerts her power over others as a sexual and emotional being in order to support her goals. Dr. Gaul wants to understand human nature and bend it to her own will: to do this, she sacrifices her humanity. Sejanus wants to live in a world where moral decisions align with what he’s legally allowed to do. When they don’t, he tries to act outside the law: the price he and men like the rebel Arlo Chance pay is their lives.
Society, Wealth, and Class
The stark class divide between the opulent Capitol and the impoverished Districts forms the backdrop of the novel's social commentary. The Capitol is the seat of all of Panem’s wealth and power, and the people who live there wield an enormously disproportionate amount of the country’s resources. In order to justify the horrifying actions of the Hunger Games, people in the Capitol convince each other that people from the Districts are not only from a lower social class than them but are actually subhuman in comparison to themselves and their children. The Games themselves are a grotesque reminder of this artificial inequality. So is the propaganda about the stupidity and primitiveness of District people which TV presenters like Lucky Flickerman broadcast.
The Games are a form of revenge-fueled entertainment for the wealthy, who relish seeing the people who have bombed their homes suffer in real-time. Forcing the Districts to supply tributes keeps them subjugated, reminding the people who don’t live in the Capitol that they have little power and no agency. When the parents of the Districts can’t save their own children from the yearly chance of being publicly murdered, the Gamemakers feel that the chances of another attempted rebellion will remain low.
Sejanus' attempted escape from the world run by the Capitol adds another layer to the simmering class descent around the Hunger Games. Sejanus has money, he was educated in the Capitol, and he served as a mentor in the Games. However, because his parents came from District 2, he’s considered a second-class citizen. Stories like his show that even having the resources to defect to the Capitol’s side doesn’t mean that one will be accepted or welcomed. The distance drawn between him and polite society may be subtly outlined, but it’s always unmistakably there.
The class line is easier to see between the Capitol and the people of the Districts. Those social boundaries are drawn along a brutally simple line: people’s children are either safe from Reaping, or they are not. People are either being protected by the Peacekeepers or brutalized by them. People are either free to leave their District, or they are prisoners of those who control them.
Physical and Emotional Violence
The Hunger Games—designed to remind all the residents of the Districts of the Capitol’s power every year, lest they rebel again—are just one aspect of this book’s theme of physical and emotional violence. In the Capitol, brutality is celebrated as entertainment, and kindness is often seen as weakness. In the Arena, tributes are forced to kill each other for the amusement of the audience. Growing up around the Games desensitizes the Capitol citizens to the true cost of human life exacted by the Games. Almost everyone alive during the novel's events has also lived through an invasive, destructive series of conflicts. The streets of both Capitol and District are pocked with bomb- and bullet holes. Coriolanus frequently has episodes where traumatic memories and PTSD-like symptoms from a childhood among falling armaments immobilize him. Lucy, Sejanus, Coriolanus, and Tigris have all grown up surrounded by the stench of death and the very real possibility of their own.
The novel’s physical violence is mirrored in its emotional manipulation and Panem’s constant psychological warfare. The country’s civil war is over, but the internal skirmishes and battles rage as fiercely as ever. Coriolanus preys on fear and vulnerability to control Lucy Gray Baird. Dr. Gaunt and Dean Highbottom exploit his fears and those of the other mentors to brainwash and manipulate them into compliance. The Games themselves are designed to inflict emotional torment on the tributes; there are no prizes at this early stage in their history, just death or survival.
As the novel progresses, the line between physical and emotional harm blurs. There are overt and more subtle instances of this throughout. When Marcus’s broken, tortured body is hoisted above the arena, it's intended to elicit an emotional response from everybody who sees it. Physical violence against him is translated into an emotional threat: defy the Capitol and suffer the consequences. More subtly, emotional violence is often the prelude to physical violence. When he finds the stash of contraband in Sejanus’s locker at Peacekeeper training, Coriolanus is heartbroken to see irrefutable evidence that his friend has repeatedly betrayed him. Because of this, he contemplates turning Sejanus into the authorities, which would almost certainly result in his death. Emotional and physical violence are utterly normalized in the Capitol by citizens, Gamemakers, and lawmakers alike. They are seen as the most effective way of maintaining order and holding onto power.
Survival
In the unforgiving world of Panem, every person on the street is preoccupied with how they are going to survive their dangerous lives. Lucy Grey is a survival expert: she may not be able to do very many push-ups, but her resourcefulness and cunning shine through as she navigates both Games and romantic relationships. She uses her musical talent, charisma, and strategic alliances to stay alive: they earn her money, keep her safe, and make people sympathize with her. Like many oppressed people forced to take desperate measures to remain breathing, Lucy and the Covey are forced to adapt and make difficult choices under constant threat. Even Coriolanus' choices, though often morally ambiguous, stem from a desire for self-preservation and advancement. This problem is twofold for him. Firstly, he knows that he and his family will be homeless if he doesn’t make a name for himself. Secondly, abandoning his pretensions to grandeur would kill the only part of him that Coriolanus values: the part that’s a Snow. Collins doesn't shy away from portraying the harsh realities of survival, highlighting the toll it takes on individuals and communities. Death is not an idle threat in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: corpses begin to pile up before Part 1 of the novel concludes.
