The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Essay Questions

How is this book related to the original Hunger Games trilogy? Despite these connections, can this book be taken as a standalone read? Why or why not?

This novel is a prequel to the original series and follows President Snow as a young man. Surprisingly, Snow is depicted as a friendly, impoverished student, who is hoping to escape his disadvantaged situation by mentoring a winning tribute in the tenth annual Hunger Games. This series illuminates some of the lore introduced in the trilogy, including the Mockingjay, which is linked back to the original rebellion. Beyond symbolism, settings central to the trilogy's later story of Katniss Everdeen are given considerable attention: both District 12 and the Capitol are developed with additional world-building. A few characters (Coriolanus Snow, Tigris) appear in both timeframes, while different generations of Capitol families (the Snows, the Heavensbees, the Cranes) are featured throughout the series.

Despite these many connections, readers can enjoy The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes as an independent read - or as an entry point for the rest of the Hunger Games series. The young versions of Snow and Tigris (striving, eager-to-please young adults) and their much older counterparts (a sociopathic quasi-dictator and an eccentric, fallen-from-grace fashion designer) are remarkably different. While the 65-or-so years that intervene between The Ballad and the Katniss trilogy warp these characters beyond recognition at times, other connections are less central to the plot. Only a Hunger Games fanatic might notice a possible connection between Arachne Crane (killed just before the 10th Hunger Games) and Gamemaker Seneca Crane (killed between the 74th and 75th). Nevertheless, readers who would be most drawn to The Ballad are probably Hunger Games fanatics of exactly this sort. The novel is thus something of a paradox: capable of appeal beyond the series with its stark portrait of a morally vexed main character, but most likely to be of interest to series devotees.

Is the relationship between Snow and Lucy bound to fail from the outset? Why or why not? What exactly undermines their relationship?

The relationship between Lucy and Snow becomes close in the novel, as the two are connected by their mutual aim of winning the Hunger Games. Together, they devise a plan to ensure that Lucy will win - with a mixture of self-promotion, evasion, and poisoning - and Snow even cheats to ensure this outcome. Later, when he is found out, the two meet again in District 12, but their relationship implodes.

There are a few key aspects of Snow's background and personality that could explain why this relationship was doomed - perhaps doomed from the start. Despite Snow's occasional insistence that the Covey performers are wanderers and are not really "District," the Snow-and-Lucy romance brings together two dissimilar, antagonistic worlds. The differences between the aristocratic, family-oriented Snow and the free-spirited, virtually orphaned Lucy may be too significant to overcome. It is also possible that Snow was always his father's cold, calculating son - that his personality is too fundamentally based on self-interest and material gain for him to embrace a relationship that cannot really "get him ahead" in life. At the time of the Epilogue, he sees his romance with Lucy as a deviation from the ambitious and unfeeling course that he is meant to follow.

What character traits are revealed when Show "cheats" in the Tenth Hunger Games?

Snow cheats numerous times in the novel to ensure that Lucy wins. First, he gives Lucy food after he discovers she hasn't had any since entering the Capitol. Then, when the games begin, he puts a handkerchief with Lucy's scent on it into a snake tank intended for the arena so that the snakes become familiar with her smell and do not attack her. His schemes work, and Lucy wins the games; his cheating ways, though, are eventually discovered.

This cheating suggests a few different interpretations, in terms of significance. One line of argumentation would be that Snow's ploys show his affection for Lucy and his willingness to risk his academic future for the sake of true love. Another much less idealistic line of thought would be that Snow's cheating is the maneuvering of a young man in already desperate circumstances - the decline and possible eviction of his family. He may simply see cheating as a high-risk, high-reward attempt that is worth making. In any event, Snow's end-of-the-book forgiveness for this cheating reveals some unmistakable traits of the Capitol: the sense that the powerful people in Panem get to define or redefine cheating however they want, and the reality that those in the Districts have no such privileges.

Do the quotations that set up The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes serve a useful purpose within the narrative, or are these epigraphs simply distracting?

As items that provide intellectual context, the five epigraphs have a few unmistakable connections to Coryo Snow's story. The first three - from political philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau - offer classical reflections on the nature of freedom and government. Of these, the excerpt from Hobbes may be most on-point, since Hobbes is frequently interpreted as an advocate of harsh, controlling government as a necessary antidote to chaos - an ideology that Dr. Gaul and eventually Snow himself embrace. The quotation from British poet William Wordsworth raises several themes (reversal, murder, music) that are central to the novel, along with an off-the-page connection: Lucy Gray takes her name from a Wordsworth poem. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as the seminal story of the making of a monster, has an easy connection to the emergence of Coryo's own monstrous qualities.

Indeed, these quotations resonate with different aspects of the text - but how necessary are those resonances to the novel? The target reader for dystopian young adult fiction is, naturally, a young adult, not a literary professional who could situate Enlightenment political theory or the formative works of Romanticism without a second thought - though one could also argue, on the other hand, that these epigraphs are useful precisely as a way of introducing young readers to these classic sources and schools of thought. An equally fair critique may be that there are epigraphs that would be more appropriate: excerpts from the Roman classics, perhaps, considering the reliance on Roman-inspired character names and Colosseum-inspired bloodshed throughout the Hunger Games series.

At what point, exactly, does Snow begin to transform from a decent person into a villain? Was there something about his family or his upbringing that planted the seeds of evil in him even before the book began?

Finding an exact pivot point for Snow's transition from talented but outwardly normal young man to cold-blooded killer is difficult, but not impossible. To figure out his moral degeneration, consider what each murder represents and when he stops feeling any pangs of morality. His murder of a tribute is disturbing yet complicated by the kill-or-be-killed situation that he faces; his willingness to turn Sejanus in for treason is, again, disturbing yet complicated by Snow's loyalty to the Capitol and whatever ideal of order it represents. In contrast, Snow's poisoning of Highbottom is not presented with the same sort of moral ambivalence, at least on Snow's part. This final killing is, perhaps, when the Snow of the later books - willing to kill even those who are loyal enough to the Capitol - truly emerges.

There is a case to be made, however, that the sociopathic sides of Snow's personality were there all along. Even though Snow's father is dead by the time the book begins, we know that the elder Snow helped to create the Hunger Games, and he did so with a combination of moral indifference and backstabbing. The same traits - directed at the same victim, Highbottom - manifest themselves in Coryo during the book's epilogue. Duplicitous evil, like landing on top, is a hallmark of the Snow family.