Why I like The Hunger Games (Pt 2): Katniss

Starting with the main character is as good a place as any, and is perhaps an obvious place to start.  But let me say that I'm not in love with Katniss.  I don't relate to her particularly well, and I think that the first-person, present-tense narrative keeps the reader at arm's length in a counter-intuitive sort of way, preventing the reader from getting in her head.  But all of this is why the construction of her character is so intriguing to me.

First, her personality.  I have this one figured out.  She's an ISTJ to my INFP.  From Wikipedia:

ISTJs are faithful, logical, organized, sensible, and earnest traditionalists who enjoy keeping their lives and environments well-regulated. Typically reserved and serious individuals, they earn success through their thoroughness and extraordinary dependability. They are capable of shutting out distractions in order to take a practical, logical approach to their endeavors, and are able to make the tough decisions that other types avoid. Realistic and responsible, ISTJs are often seen as worker bees striving steadily toward their goals. They take special joy in maintaining institutions and are often highly religious. Despite their dependability and good intentions, however, ISTJs can experience difficulty in understanding and responding to the emotional needs of others. 

Although they often focus on their internal world, ISTJs prefer dealing with the present and the factual. They are detail-oriented and weigh various options when making decisions, although they generally stick to the conventional. ISTJs are well-prepared for eventualities and have a good understanding of most situations. They believe in practical objectives, and they value traditions and loyalty.

If I am slightly uncomfortable with analyzing a character according to the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am buoyed by Freudian analyses of characters, and by the very fact that, in this particular case, it makes so much sense!

So what does this mean?  In terms of the narrative voice, the emphasis in the ISTJ description on "the present and the factual" in conjunction with focus on the individual's "internal world" justifies the slightly irritating first person, present tense narration.  In fact, it's a little too neatly packaged. In terms of audience engagement, and I can only speak for myself, we have a character who is opposite from me in every possible way--except introversion.  So having figured out intuitively (INFP) why I can't find myself in the character, suddenly I can see it in concrete terms. Katniss resists introspection.  An INFP would reflect back--almost incessantly.  Katniss lives in her mind, but in the moment.  For whatever reason--personality or circumstances--she easily leaves the past behind (at least, when she is operating from her conscious mind--and trauma notwithstanding).  She is living in the moment--because she has to.  And because she lives in the moment, she survives--or, because she is a survivor, she knows to live in the moment.

Katniss is not a reader.  Literacy does not figure prominently into The Hunger Games (more on this later), but even in its absence, literacy is conspicuous.  In the children's/young adult genre, female characters are readers.  In the development of female characters, there seems to be an unspoken, unwritten, but understood rule that girls need smart characters who read to teach them that reading and being smart are okay.  The exceptional, very bright, slightly odd, female reader is such a commonplace motif as to make claims to the exceptionality of such a character hollow.  Consider, for example, the very mundane female protagonist of Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices series.  Every now and then, the narrative shows Tessa with a book to remind the reader that her literacy is one of her distinguishing features, when otherwise, she is pretty bland.  So Katniss's very difference from these supposedly extraordinary female characters is refreshing.

So why do I like Katniss?

Although I am not particularly engaged by being able to relate to Katniss's personality--so different from my own--my own personality type causes me to read empathetically (I'm hammering the Meyers-Briggs, but it's sort of fun from a "rhetoric of reading" standpoint, because it can explain, to an extent, why certain readers engage with texts and characters the way we do!)  So I am sympathetic to Katniss's circumstances, and more sympathetic to her manipulation by those around her, when that comes to light in Catching Fire.  In fact, it was while reading Catching Fire that I really started to like the books and Katniss's character.

It is easy to understand Katniss's motivations, given what the reader knows about her character and her circumstances.  She is exactly what she should be, given what the reader knows.  And as a reader, I don't like to be unfairly manipulated by an author into feeling something I don't want to feel (as in The Giver), or thinking something that is untrue.  Katniss is satisfyingly well-constructed as a character.  And above all, what is predictable are her convictions.  There is a moment in book 3 when she votes in favor of "one last Hunger Games," and I wonder, as a reader, if this is an inconsistency in her character.  But then, I wonder whether that vote is sincere given the subsequent turn of events.

It her predictability (another ISTJ quality) as enacted in the novels that makes her vulnerable to manipulation--and having one's values subject one to manipulation is something an INFP can understand.  So there's a connection after all.  As a person of action rather than contemplation, Katniss acts from her convictions.  When she acts, she makes it count, as in volunteering for Prim in the Hunger Games, or survival in the games themselves.  Haymitch recognizes this trait throughout, and uses it for various purposes--most notably the revolutionary propaganda in book 3.

But finally, I come back to that narrative voice.  When the author's choice of a technique is so obvious as to register as a little bit wrong, there should be a definite reason for drawing attention to that choice.  I learned this from Robert Browning's verse, though Robert Frost has moments as well (Something there is that doesn't love a wall - one of the clunkiest lines in iambic pentameter).  As she moves through the events of the three novels, Katniss resists contemplation, even as she tries to work out what's happening to her.  She focuses on details rather than abstract concepts.  The narrative reinforces the sense of moving forward rather than looking backward, and does not give the reader advantages over the character's self-awareness, or lack thereof.  Rather, the reader experiences how baffling it is to be living one's own coming-of-age.  I can't speak to how it would have been to read this as a young adult.  I likely would have been more frustrated by the lack of introspection, because I wanted to figure out what was happening, or what had happened, and theorize about it.  I still do.  But looking at The Hunger Games, I can read the narrative, and live with the character, and think--yeah, it was exactly like that.  So at the end of the day, Katniss's narrative feels authentic.  And so does she.