Read The Girl Who Was on Fire for Free Online

British, and so perhaps comes from a more culturally optimistic place when it comes to rebellions—ultimately insists that love is strong enough to survive through the horrors placed before it.
    The Hunger Games’ Katniss was a hard, calculating, distrustful person even before her time in the arenas and the war, and yet her largest decisions are always motivated by love. She volunteers for the Games in order to save Prim’s life, something that is almost never done because the Capitol teaches people to put their own self-preservation before any bond of love in such a situation, even a bond as close as that between Katniss and Prim. Katniss defies this.
    Suzanne Collins has explained that Katniss is “a girl who should never have existed,” an unexpected outcome of a security glitch in the Capitol’s regime, just like the mockingjays. She is “this girl who slips under this fence ... and along with that goes a degree of independent thinking that is unusual in the districts.” 2
    Neither of the cages the Capitol has in place—the fence, prioritizing self-preservation over love for family or friends—hold her, and by breaking out, she makes other people realize that they can too. On live television, all over Panem, she introduces a radical new idea: that it is important to care about other people; that it is the most important thing in the world.
    While we’re talking about television, it’s important to touch on one of the strangest ways in which the Hunger Games owes a debt to Nineteen Eighty-Four . Nineteen Eighty-Four includes the
phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” which in that novel means that the state—personified by its leader, Big Brother—can see everything you do. You are never safe from its surveillance, and all treason will be found out.
    These days, of course, “Big Brother” means something completely different, as it is the name of one of the first of the wildly popular shows in the reality television genre. In Big Brother , a group of people are thrown together in a closed environment and watched by audiences at home. Big Brother is watching them, and we are watching Big Brother .
    President Snow, in controlling the districts via the Hunger Games, is both Big Brothers at once: the dictator and the reality television producer. The Hunger Games series very consciously plays with the fact that it follows not only Orwell’s novel, but also the entertainment revolution it inadvertantly spawned.
    In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is another equivalent to President Snow, a character named O’Brien who, in describing how his government has achieved such total power over people, also neatly sums up the Capitol’s intentions:
    We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.
    This is what makes Katniss’ self-sacrifice for Prim such a powerful act. If the Capitol had really succeeded at severing those links, then it would have been Primrose Everdeen who went into the arena, not her older sister, wouldn’t it?
    And there is a love story in Nineteen Eighty-Four , just as there is one in the Hunger Games. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , it is between a man named Winston and a woman named Julia. Like Peeta in Mockingjay , Winston and Julia are punished for their
rebellion by being tortured in specific ways that make them hate the person they were once in love with. Like Katniss, their wills are finally broken when they are presented with what, to them, is the worst thing in the world. (The worst thing for Katniss was losing Prim, but for Winston it is much more banal: he has a phobia of rats, and is threatened with being eaten by them. Julia’s worst fear is never revealed to the reader.)
    When the two love stories are compared, you can see much of Winston and Julia in the way Suzanne Collins has written Peeta and Katniss’ story, and in just how important and powerful the romance Peeta and Katniss put on for the cameras through the first two novels of the