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
It’s October. Snow is now wildly popular after his stint with the Peacekeepers. He’s been taking honors classes on military strategy with Dr. Gaul, and he has an internship with the Gamemakers. They’ve taken Coriolanus’s suggestions to give food to everyone in the winning tribute’s district, and a house to the winning tribute. This will increase engagement and yield better “performers.”
Note that Coriolanus is now going by his last name, something that makes him seem powerful and mysterious. His suggestions for the Hunger Games continue to dehumanize the tributes and incentivize the Games. This all encourages people to get involved, rather than question whether the Games are ethical in the first place.
Themes
Snow strokes his soft leather satchel, which was a gift from the Plinths. After he returned, Strabo Plinth asked to work something out. He bought the Snow apartment and the one underneath for his family. Ma helps with Grandma’am, and Strabo pays for everything. Coriolanus is now the Plinths’ heir, and Coriolanus can almost forget that Strabo is district.
Coriolanus still clearly detests Strabo Plinth because he’s from District Two. He’s willing to use the man because it’s convenient, but Coriolanus is so beyond seeing Strabo as a person or someone to actually get to know. Strabo is a tool, not a person, which is in line with how Coriolanus sees all district folk.
Themes
It would’ve been Sejanus’s 19th birthday tonight. Snow has invited Festus and Lysistrata for dinner, and he plans to give Ma and Strabo Sejanus’s box of personal effects. But before he can head home, Coriolanus heads for the Academy and knocks on Dean Highbottom’s office door. He asks the dean for his mother’s compact, which Highbottom hands over. Then, Coriolanus pulls out Sejanus’s box, replaces the diploma in the frame with a photo of the Plinth family, and swipes Sejanus’s medicine bottles into the trash.
As Coriolanus describes the dinner in Sejanus’s honor, it again looks like this whole event is just for show, not actually to honor Sejanus. Coriolanus knows he has to impress the people who are giving him money, and this is an easy way to do it. It also seems like Coriolanus’s trip to Dean Highbottom’s office is just for show. Accepting the empty compact symbolizes Coriolanus’s moral bankruptcy at this point in the novel.
Themes
Dean Highbottom asks if Snow grew a heart in the districts, but Snow says he got one during the Hunger Games—which were Highbottom’s idea. But Highbottom explains that he and Crassus Snow came up with the idea for the games. Dr. Gaul had assigned them to create a punishment for an enemy that would never let that enemy forget their crimes. Highbottom came up with it one night while he was drunk—and the next morning, he discovered that Crassus had given the paper to Dr. Gaul for the grade. Highbottom has never forgiven him.
Finally, Dean Highbottom reveals why he hates Coriolanus so much. Crassus, it seems, was much like Coriolanus in that he was willing to do anything, no matter how unethical, if it meant he got ahead. With this, Dean Highbottom starts to look like a man who, like so many, has the capacity to come up with some terrible ideas. But unlike Coriolanus and Crassus, he’d like to actually help people. For the most part, though, he’s powerless to do so next to the Capitol.
Themes
Get the entire The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes LitChart as a printable PDF.
Snow notes that Crassus is dead, but Dean Highbottom points out that Dr. Gaul is still staging the Hunger Games. He started taking morphling when she first proposed putting the Hunger Games in practice and he hasn’t stopped. Coriolanus notes that the Games support how Dr. Gaul feels about humanity. She uses children because they’re innocent, and when children become killers, it proves that humans are naturally violent. Then, Dean Highbottom asks how Lucy Gray felt about Coriolanus leaving 12. Coriolanus says they were both sad, but he has to get home—he’s overseeing the delivery of a new living room set.
In order to deal with the guilt and the trauma of being the person who invented a system that dehumanizes so many, Dean Highbottom turns to drugs. This doesn’t even seem to register for Coriolanus, though—even if Highbottom doesn’t support the Hunger Games, Coriolanus does. He seems to be actively trying to rile up Highbottom by noting that the Games prove that humans are naturally violent. Children represent a hope for the future—and if they’ll kill people on national television, the future is, he implies, going to be violent.
Themes
Snow doesn’t want to talk about Lucy Gray with anyone; nobody knows where she went and according to a letter from Smiley, people think Mayor Lipp killed her. Smiley also wrote that there’s a new commander, and he’s outlawed shows at the Hob, since music causes trouble. Snow agrees. Lucy Gray in real life is now like the Lucy Gray in the song—a ghost. But she can never harm him again. Coriolanus knows now it wouldn’t have worked out. He’s recently decided to marry Livia Cardew, since he’ll never love her. He imagines them years from now, as president and first lady, still running the Hunger Games. People will think he’s evil—but humanity should thank him, since he’ll be the one ensuring humanity’s survival.
Lucy Gray may have become a ghost, but this doesn’t mean she’s gone—her music plays a huge role in The Hunger Games. The fact that Coriolanus doesn’t care what happened to her, just that she can’t hurt him, shows again how morally bankrupt he is. His only aims are to become powerful and seize as much control as he possibly can. If the consequence of this is that people think he’s evil, so be it. At this point, he thinks that keeping the Hunger Games alive is the only way to keep civilization going. This is an indicator of how much he’s bought Dr. Gaul’s way of looking at humanity and the world.
Themes
As Coriolanus walks home past Pluribus’s nightclub, he smiles. Last week, he picked up a pinch of rat poison in the nearby alley and painstakingly put it into Sejanus’s morphling bottle. Dean Highbottom will never suspect the bottle now in his trash can. As Dean Highbottom dies, hopefully he’ll realize that “Snow lands on top.”
The novel’s chilling ending shows that after murdering three, possibly four people (if he killed Lucy Gray), Coriolanus no longer feels any remorse, and he doesn’t value human life—aside from his own. With this, he’s tipped over into the realm of true evil. Presumably, he’ll continue down this path for the next 64 years—until this novel’s story reaches the beginning of The Hunger Games.
Themes
