The Hunger Games — Chapter 6

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter's argument or narrative arc, then identify the central tension and evaluate whether the author handles it honestly.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter's deepest moral move is the equation, made by Katniss in her own private narration, between her failure to help the Avox couple in the woods and her position as a Capitol viewer of the Hunger Games — 'just like I was watching the Games.' Examine this collapse rigorously. Does the chapter argue that bystanding is always a form of complicity (a strong claim that implicates anyone who has ever failed to intervene), or is it making a more limited argument that some specific failures generate a haunting that other failures do not? Defend your reading and address the strongest counter-position, including the philosophical view that intervention has costs and that sometimes the right moral judgment is to refuse a useless sacrifice.
2. Collins constructs Peeta in this chapter as a precisely engineered instance of strategic ambiguity. He covers Katniss's dinner mistake with the Delly Cartwright lie, asks for her secret on the roof, and secures her jacket button at her neck before walking her to her room. Each gesture is small, observable, and could be interpreted as either calculated or sincere. Evaluate this as a craft achievement. Is Collins building a portrait of a person whose strategic and emotional intelligence are inseparable — and arguing that the inseparability is itself a moral category produced by the Capitol — or is she postponing characterological commitment to keep open a romance plot that the genre demands?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide