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Copywork
About This Passage
Selected for rhetorical sophistication (the deepening series of confessions, each clause reaching further back into culpability), thematic weight (Katniss's recognition that watching is itself a form of complicity), and the climactic comparison to 'watching the Games' that turns the Games into the moral category for all such failures of intervention.
I'd set out to tell her I was sorry about dinner, but I know that my apology runs much deeper. That I'm ashamed I never tried to help her in the woods. That I let the Capitol kill the boy and mutilate...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?
Discussion Questions
- Collins positions the chapter's central confession not in a private bedroom or an isolated corner of the Training Center but on the roof, in a wind chime garden, with electric fences preventing escape. Examine this setting as a deliberate piece of stagecraft. What does the location reveal about the nature of speech in the Capitol — and about how trust becomes possible only when ordinary speech becomes impossible?
- Peeta tells Katniss, 'I'd leave here,' then immediately covers it with a joke about the food. Examine the doubleness of this moment. Is Peeta confessing a real impulse and then retracting it for safety, or is he performing a fake confession as bait to see how Katniss responds? What in the chapter — including his behavior with the Avox lie — supports your reading?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A Capitol servant whose tongue has been surgically removed as punishment, producing permanent silencing both literal and political
Item 2
Cruel and uncivilized behavior, particularly when imputed to an entire society or system rather than a single act
Item 3
An opponent in a contest of will or interest; here, the official designation tributes are supposed to assume toward each other
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Critical Thinking
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