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Chapter 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Hunger Games, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Division and Control
Love, Loyalty, and Compassion
Societal Inequality
Appearances
Hypocrisy
Summary
Analysis
When Peeta runs back to finish off the girl, Katniss overhears the Career Tributes discussing whether they should kill him or not. It seems that they’re keeping Peeta with them because they hope that he’ll lead them to Katniss. When Peeta returns and the pack heads off, Katniss rolls out of her tree. She realizes that the cameras will be focusing on her after she overheard the Career Tributes talking, and she decides to pretend that she’s one step ahead of the game, smiling knowingly.
Katniss knows that it’s important that the audience doesn’t see that she’s flustered, so she appears poised instead. She gives the audience something to guess at, since she knows that the Games are just entertainment for them, and the more suspense there is, the more exciting they’ll find the show.
Themes
Before Katniss leaves the area, she checks her snare traps and finds one rabbit. She returns to the dead girl’s fire to warm the rabbit meat on the remaining coals, which are still hot, and she uses the ashes to camouflage her backpack before heading off in the opposite direction of the other tributes. Her top priority is finding water. As the day goes on, Katniss grows more and more desperate for water but still isn’t able to locate any. She almost devours some berries for their moisture before she realizes that they’re unfamiliar to her and could be poisonous.
Katniss’s suspicion of the berries reflects her wariness of other surface appearances as well. She has a hard time believing anything Peeta says, for example, and it took much longer for her to relax around Gale than vice versa.
Themes
By the next day, Katniss is desperate for water and angry that Haymitch hasn’t sent her any. She believes she must have sponsors who want to send her some water. It occurs to Katniss that perhaps she’s close to finding some, and this is the reason Haymitch is withholding it, but by afternoon, she believes she’s reached the end of her abilities. As she collapses and drifts off, Katniss realizes that she’s lying on mud, and she hurriedly follows it to a small pond, where she drinks and fills her water bottle. That evening, there are no deaths to show, and Katniss drifts off to sleep in her sleeping bag, only to be awakened before dawn by a wall of fire descending upon her.
Katniss’s suspicion of surface appearances is to her benefit here. She realizes that Haymitch might be sending her a message by refusing to send her a sponsor gift. As a result, she keeps walking and stumbles across the pond herself, without having to use up precious sponsor funding. Katniss and Haymitch have a kind of second sense of each other, and both realize that they can communicate both through what is communicated and what isn't.
Themes
