BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 6: Avox Populi

This chapter begins awkwardly and boringly:

The Training Center has a tower designed exclusively for the tributes and their teams. This will be our home until the actual games begin. Each district has an entire floor. You simply step onto an elevator and press the number of your district. Easy enough to remember.

Yes, please tell us more about the elevators! (You could have AT LEAST made a joke about how THIS building has no 13th floor for a DIFFERENT reason, Katniss.) And it doesn't get much better from there, wandering to a kind of nebulous and boring reveal. Not to give away the store but: essentially Panem takes some of its political dissidents, cuts out their tongues, and makes them... work in luxury hotels. When the evil government central to your plot treats political prisoners better than most current nations it's hard to feel much of anything. Avoxes have JOBS, you know?

Chapter 6

Effie Trinket is all excited about the splash our heroes made at the opening ceremonies and is talking Katniss up about their chances:

“Everyone has their reservations, naturally. You being from the coal district. But I said, and this was very clever of me, I said, 'Well, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls!'”

That's a pretty good rendering of the kind of thing a person like Effie Trinket would say, and the incorrectness of the statement is a decent Sopranos-style gag. But Katniss goes on to explain precisely where pearls come from, the fact that Effie Trinket was thinking of diamonds, and that it's actually graphite, not coal, that can be pressed into diamonds, and in the process kind of ruins all the fun. You're supposed to murder OTHER TEENAGERS, not jokes!

Katniss gets to her fancy quarters and describes the high-tech amenities: a shower with hundreds of automatic settings, a window you can manipulate for different views, a bed that fucks you in several positions (well, on that last one I'm reading between the lines). She can order any food she wants, so she walks “around the room eating goose liver and puffy bread” until she gets called down to dinner. Faced with unlimited room-service options, I can't imagine goose liver would be my first choice. Have you ever even HAD a pulled-pork sandwich, Katniss?

Then she goes to dinner where Cinna and his partner Portia are waiting along with Peeta, Effie, and Haymitch. Our narrator is served wine and tries it for the first time in her life. Sadly, she gives up on it halfway through her glass, disliking the “foggy” feeling in her brain. What? How could you not like that feeling!? It's SUCH A GOOD FEELING, especially when you're dancing! Maybe you just need to power through this drink and have a second one, Kat. Let me make you a cocktail or something, maybe? Anyway a server comes to the table and when Katniss claims to recognize her, the rest of the people at the table are horrified. Haymitch explains, after the girl flees, that she's an Avox, a criminal who had her tongue cut out. He suggests that it's unlikely she'd know her, and it's clear that knowing her would be kind of an issue (friends of the communists got blacklisted too). Katniss starts to remember some long-forgotten trauma while Peeta covers her ass, claiming that the girl is a “dead ringer” for someone they went to school with.

They eat a cake (which was set on fire before serving, like a damn Flaming Moe) and Haymitch brings up the hand-holding in the parade, calling it “the perfect touch of rebellion.” Coincidentally that's my band's name, but anyway Katniss realizes that the other tributes barely acknowledged each other. “Presenting ourselves not as adversaries but as friends has distinguished us as much as the fiery costumes,” Katniss tells us.

Peeta walks Katniss back to her room and indicates he wants to know how she knows the tongueless girl. Katniss wants to talk about it, but also worries that confessing will allow Peeta to have another advantage over her (shut up, Katniss). They head to the roof of the training center where the wind will prevent any surveillance and Katniss explains that one day while she and Gale were hunting they saw the Avox and a boy fleeing through the woods. A hovercraft showed up (a hovercraft showed up? There are HOVERCRAFTS!? YESSS) to capture the girl and kill the boy, but not before the girl cried for help and Katniss didn't move from her hiding place.

Never mind that her inaction probably saved her life and that there was certainly very little she could do to fight a damn hovercraft and that for all she knows the girl was a murderer—Katniss feels guilty (though not guilty enough to even remember the whole event at first). She goes back to her room and the Avox is picking up her fire suit clothes off the floor (with oven mitts, I assume). Way to double down, tongueless girl (“You couldn't save me from capture AND you can't use a hamper?”-Tongueless Girl). Katniss rather unfairly compares the way she watched the girl get captured that day to the way people watch the Hunger Games, and muses that the Avox will probably enjoy watching her die.

Stray Notes & Questions

• This chapter doesn't really have a central event, but the running motif is voice, and the power(s) of speech. Effie blathers on in the elevator, Katniss notes that all you need to do is whisper into a microphone to order food, Katniss obsesses over the cry for help from the girl that was one of the last sounds she ever made. Peeta speaks very carefully at the dinner table and every time he says something that could be construed as anti-government. He takes Katniss to the roof to avoid being overheard. Katniss, we know, has never been very good at holding her tongue.
• "Vox" is Latin for "voice," so "avox" is "without a voice." Clever (enough)! I'm glad Latin survived the collapse of Western Civilization.
  
• So something's going on with Cinna, right? The only other character I can think of with his name is Cinna in Julius Caesar, and THAT Cinna was a conspirator who overthrew the government and recruited Brutus for same. JUST SAYING.