The compass symbolizes Coriolanus’s final choice to prioritize amassing power and prestige over his relationships and to follow in his father’s footsteps. Coriolanus takes the compass, which once belonged to his father Crassus Snow, to District 12 with him when he’s stationed there with the Peacekeepers. Coriolanus doesn’t think much of it, but when he and Lucy Gray decide to run away together, Coriolanus takes the compass and believes it’ll come in handy as a navigation device. However, running away together doesn’t go as planned—Lucy Gray realizes Coriolanus is responsible for Sejanus’s execution, runs from Coriolanus, and sets traps for him in the woods. Their brief trip culminates in Coriolanus possibly shooting Lucy Gray and then swimming into a lake to sink a bag of weapons, which includes the gun he used to kill Mayfair. After his swim, Coriolanus’s other effects (his mother’s rose-scented powder and some family photos) are destroyed. All that survives the swim is the compass. And after this experience, Coriolanus decides he’ll never fall in love again; instead, he’ll seek power and connections through any means necessary—even if that means shooting his former lover. The compass surviving the ordeal shows Coriolanus that the only way to survive is to emulate his father. This starts him on the path to becoming the cruel leader readers are familiar with in the Hunger Games trilogy, which takes place 64 years after the events of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
The Compass 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 Compass Symbol Timeline in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
