Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Propaganda, Spectacle, and Morality
Children
Government and Power
Human Nature
Trust and Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
Coriolanus isn’t sure why the snakes are behaving like this, and he never told Lucy Gray about Clemensia and the snakes. Maybe Lucy Gray’s song is keeping them from killing her. Finally, Lucy Gray starts in on the lyrics. The song sounds old; she talks about someone heading for “the sweet old hereafter.” Coriolanus tries to parse the meaning of the song as the snakes huddle around Lucy Gray, and the other tributes climb to a safe height. The speaker in the song agrees to follow someone to heaven when they’ve finished their business on earth. When Lucy Gray finishes, she hums, which soothes the snakes.
Lucy Gray’s song seems to be about accepting her death—but only after she’s finished with whatever she’s up to on earth. The song, in this way, is a form of protest: Lucy Gray isn’t going to give up until she’s done with the Hunger Games. Coriolanus dislikes this sort of critical thinking exercise, though, so rather than figuring this out, he’s just confused. The song, to him, is a convenient tool to keep the snakes from killing her, nothing more.
Themes
Dr. Gaul’s face is stony as the auditorium erupts in applause for Lucy Gray. She suggests the audience remember Gaius Breen, so Lepidus interviews Coriolanus and his classmates. Coriolanus is the only one able to connect Gaius’s death to the snakes, telling Lepidus that “when hit, we hit back twice as hard.” Everyone but the remaining five mentors heads home after dinner, and Coriolanus knows he has to focus on winning the Plinth Prize. It starts to rain in the arena as Coriolanus and the mentors settle in; they plan to sleep in Heavensbee Hall tonight.
Dr. Gaul is clearly trying to draw Coriolanus into her orbit and her way of thinking. When he frames the snakes as retaliation for Gaius Breen’s death, he also ignores the fact that he was just as horrified as everyone else to see the snakes drop into the arena. He knows dropping the snakes on the tributes was cruel and inhumane, but he knows he can’t say that and get away with it. To survive, he has to step into line.
Themes
Coriolanus decides he must make up with Clemensia. As their classmates sleep, they discuss her snakeskin (which is going away) and Coriolanus apologizes for abandoning Clemensia. They make up, share a cheese tart from Ma, and share soap in the morning. As the rest of the students file in, the screen shows sunrise in the arena. It’s not raining now, and most of the snakes died in the night. Clemensia and Vipsania send food to Treech and Reaper, but Reaper drinks from a puddle instead and then moves Coral and Circ’s bodies to lie with the others. When Mizzen mimes eating, Persephone orders food for him.
Reaper, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t trust Clemensia—after all, she wouldn’t send him food or water when he really needed it earlier, so why would he start now? Especially after the snakes were dropped in the arena, the tributes know they can’t trust anyone on the outside, perhaps even their mentors, to take care of them. They’re alone in the arena.
Themes
Teslee appears with one of the drones she picked up. From a spot under Mizzen, Teslee launches the drone into the air; it’s tied to her wrist. Mizzen accepts his first package of bread from a drone—but the drone returns to him instead of either falling or leaving the arena. More drones arrive to drop food and then remain to circle Mizzen. Urban, amused, says Teslee hacked the drones so they don’t leave Mizzen alone. Pursued by drones, Mizzen falls off his perch and snaps his neck. Teslee looks thrilled—until Treech leaps out and splits her skull. Urban stalks off the stage, while Persephone allows Lepidus to interview her. Coriolanus, Clemensia, and Vipsania—the final three mentors—arrange their chairs in a line.
The drones not only provide the tributes with food. In Teslee’s case, they also provide her with a weapon. This unexpectedly makes the Games more exciting for spectators, too, furthering Dr. Gaul’s goal of increasing viewership and getting people invested in the Games. But Teslee’s murder immediately after she kills Mizzen drives home that nothing is guaranteed in the arena, and the tributes can’t trust each other at all. It’s in their best interests to play along and attack each other—it’s the only way out of the arena alive.
Themes
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On the screen, Lucky lights sparklers to celebrate the final three tributes and ends up lighting his curtains on fire. The cameras cut back to the arena, where Lucy Gray is still hiding. When Lepidus approaches Coriolanus for an interview, Coriolanus continues to insist that Lucy Gray isn’t really district. In the arena, Reaper moves unsteadily as he adds Teslee and Mizzen’s bodies to the line of dead. He drinks from a puddle before sitting in the stands. Several hours later, Lucy Gray emerges and rinses an old water bottle in Reaper’s puddle. Coriolanus sends her food and water, which she collects. Then she checks the bodies, clearly trying to figure out who’s alive. Lepidus, interviewing Coriolanus, jokes that they should put it on the scoreboard. Coriolanus says that’s a great idea.
Throughout the novel’s first two sections, it’s shown again and again that plenty of ideas start out as jokes—such as betting, and here, the scoreboard—but end up being used to dehumanize the tributes. Putting tributes’ deaths on a scoreboard would trivialize them, in much the same way that Coriolanus crossing mentor/tribute pairs off his list trivializes those deaths. Lucky’s sparkler celebration also adds to the sense that these tributes’ deaths don’t actually matter to any Capitol viewers—they’re entertainment.
Themes
Suddenly, Lucy Gray drops her provisions. Treech leaps out and catches her wrist with his ax. But Lucy Gray leaps into his arms—and a hot pink snake bites him in the neck. He dies. Vipsania leaves the dais and Clemensia and Coriolanus sit next to each other. In the arena, Lucy Gray spreads out her food like a picnic and Coriolanus lets himself imagine winning the Plinth Prize and “keeping” Lucy Gray. It seems like if Lucy Gray can hide away and let Reaper die of hunger, she could win. Hearing the chatter around him, he realizes this is the first year that spectators care about who wins.
The fact that Lucy Gray is able to use Dr. Gaul’s snake to kill Treech suggests that she might be able to beat Dr. Gaul at her own game. At the very least, Lucy Gray can use Dr. Gaul’s weapons for her own purposes—and, like Dr. Gaul, she might not be trustworthy. Pay attention to the language Coriolanus uses: he wants to “keep” Lucy Gray. He still believes he owns her and has every right to her, if she wins. Her win doesn’t reflect on her, in other words: it’s Coriolanus’s win, and she’s his prize.
Themes
Lucy Gray spends the afternoon in the arena, watching Reaper. Suddenly, Lucy Gray walks to Treech’s body and starts to drag him to the line of dead tributes. Reaper seems to suddenly come to as he runs over, scaring Lucy Gray away, and finishes the job. But then, as he turns away, Lucy Gray starts to taunt him. She runs from her tunnel, pulls the flag off the bodies, and runs away. Coriolanus realizes that Lucy Gray is trying to make Reaper overheat in the hot sun. Finally, Reaper staggers to his puddle and drinks. He vomits, crawls to the line of bodies, and dies. Nobody moves for a half-hour, when Lucy Gray checks Reaper’s pulse and closes his eyelids.
Lucy Gray’s victory—and Reaper’s death—demonstrates more than anything the payoff of trust. Because Lucy Gray trusted Coriolanus to take care of her and send her the things she needed, she had the food and water she needed to survive. Reaper, though, was more vulnerable than he might have been otherwise because he didn’t trust Clemensia—not that he had any reason to, given how she treated him and spoke about him earlier in the Games. Trust, this suggests, is both valuable and extremely dangerous.
Themes
Lucky announces that Lucy Gray and Coriolanus won the 10th Hunger Games. The auditorium erupts as everyone cheers and celebrates Coriolanus. Coriolanus allows himself several glasses of posca before Satyria sends him to the biology lab. Coriolanus is ecstatic—until he enters the lab to find not Dr. Gaul, but Dean Highbottom. On a table is an Academy napkin, a handkerchief, and Coriolanus’s mother’s compact. Five minutes later, Coriolanus signs up to be a Peacekeeper.
Notice that while Lucy Gray won the Hunger Games, Coriolanus is the one being celebrated. This shows clearly where the Capitol’s loyalty and interest lie: with their own, not with district children they believe are subhuman. Coriolanus has to confront the consequences of cheating when Dean Highbottom presents him with evidence that Coriolanus didn’t win honestly. Becoming a Peacekeeper dashes Coriolanus’s hopes of attending the University and becoming powerful.
Themes
