Coriolanus’s relationship to his mother’s compact represents his journey of trying—and ultimately failing—to be a good, kind person. Though Coriolanus is selfish and only interested in bettering his position from the novel’s beginning, his habit of sniffing his mother’s rose-scented powder in her rose-engraved compact humanizes him. It suggests he appreciates sweet, nice things and could be more like his mother, who was kind and a music lover. The rose scent and engraving also emotionally connect Coriolanus to his family.
Coriolanus starts to give up on this when he separates the powder disk from the compact. He gives the compact to Lucy Gray so she can fill it with rat poison, take it into the Hunger Games arena, and poison her opponents. Though Coriolanus frames this as a kind thing he’s doing for Lucy Gray (as it will help her achieve victory in the ring), the fact remains that he’s corrupting the compact, something that’s beautiful, for terrible means. But the fact that he still holds onto the powder disk and sniffs it to feel close to his mother suggests that he hasn’t totally given up on being a good person yet.
In the novel’s final chapters, when Coriolanus makes an ill-fated attempt to run away with Lucy Gray, Coriolanus takes the final step in his journey of becoming a villain. When he realizes he can destroy the gun he used to murder Mayfair and then go about his life with the Peacekeepers without facing consequences, Coriolanus turns on Lucy Gray. He shoots at her in the woods, which represents a major shift from only hours before, when he was in love with her and wanted to run away with her. And after sinking the gun in a lake and heading back to base in the pouring rain, the powder disk from the compact (which was in Coriolanus’s pocket) has turned to paste and is totally unsalvageable. Later, when Coriolanus retrieves the empty compact from Dean Highbottom, Coriolanus is like the empty compact himself: from a moral perspective, he’s empty and beyond salvaging.
The Compact and Powder Quotes in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
He went to the bathroom and emptied his pockets. The lake water had reduced his mother’s rose-scented powder to a nasty paste, and he threw the whole thing in the trash. The photos stuck together and shredded when he tried to separate them, so they went the way of the powder. Only the compass had survived the outing.
The Compact and Powder Symbol Timeline in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
