Introduction

Prequels occupy a unique space within their fictional universes. It would be reckless to suggest that Ballad truly precedes the main trilogy in thought, that Coriolanus’s experiences with Lucy Gray inform his interactions with Katniss. On the contrary, Coriolanus’s interactions with Katniss inform his interactions with Lucy Gray. The prequel novel draws on the material in the main trilogy and recontextualizes it to give the main trilogy a level of depth that it previously lacked.

Stylistically, Ballad is far removed from the main trilogy. The trilogy is young adult fiction through and through. Told in first-person present, we are given intimate access to Katniss’s thoughts and feelings. Her youth, inexperience, and naïveté color our experience: we do not always see the world reliably because she does not. Ballad is written third person. We see glimpses of Coriolanus’s thoughts only when the narrator allows it, and he is no more reliable than Katniss. We must watch Coriolanus from a distance, analyzing his words and deeds to discover his true thoughts.

In this essay, I contend that Coriolanus’s youth is characterized by an internal and external struggle between good and evil. Coriolanus was not born the dictatorial Coriolanus Snow we know from the trilogy, nor is he forced into that role by purely external or environmental influence. Rather, in the mode of Greek tragedy, he forces himself into this role through the culmination of his own choices. These choices are the result of an unconscious proclivity toward selfish destructiveness.

Major themes

The yetzer hara

Judaism posits the existence of two opposing forces in the human psyche: the yetzer hatov and the yetzer hara, or the Good Inclination and the Evil Inclination respectively.

While “good and evil” are acceptable rough translations of tov and ra, the English terms carry with them a significant amount of cultural baggage and connotations which do not necessarily agree with the Hebrew usages in the Hebrew Bible. A detailed examination is beyond the scope of the present essay, but we will adopt the translations “good, beneficial [to the community], constructive” and “evil, useless or detrimental [to the community], destructive”.

The two inclinations constantly contend with each other. The yetzer hara is especially insidious:

Surely, if you do right,
There is uplift.
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master. (The Contemporary Torah, 2006, Gen. 4:7)

The power of the yetzer hara is on full display in the story of the Flood in Genesis. God wipes out all of humanity, save Noah and his family, in response to their rampant violence and injustice. Yet, God immediately repents of this act. Even God cannot vanquish the yetzer hara:

[God] smelled the pleasing odor, and [God] resolved: “Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done. (The Contemporary Torah, 2006, Gen. 8:21)

This is not to say that the yetzer hara is all-powerful. Gen 4:7 states unequivocally that “you can be its master.” It is, however, a constant and unending struggle:

Incidental to the verse, “Tremble, and do not sin,” the Gemara mentions that Rabbi Levi bar Ḥama said that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: One should always incite his good inclination against his evil inclination, i.e., that one must constantly struggle so that his evil inclination does not lead him to transgression, as it is stated: “Tremble, and do not sin.”

If one succeeds and subdues his evil inclination, excellent, but if he does not succeed in subduing it, he should study Torah, as alluded to in the verse: “Say to your heart… (Koren Talmud Bavli, 2019, Berakhot 5a:2)

The yetzer hara can be overcome by, for example, constant study and meditation on Torah, that is, immersive study and meditation on the good.

These two impulses, their influence over man’s actions and his struggle against or submission to them, provide a conceptual framework for Coriolanus’s moral development.

Tigris and Dr. Gaul

Dr. Gaul is a flat, static character. She is the representation of an idea, a certain approach to political philosophy and human nature. She does not change over the course of the narrative. Her function in the narrative is, essentially, to be the primary driving force in developing Coriolanus’s worldview. She is the physical embodiment of the yetzer hara.

There are many characters who influence Coriolanus more positively than Dr. Gaul, but there is one character who, like Dr. Gaul, is relatively flat, static, and an unambiguously good influence. If any character can represent Coriolanus’s yetzer hatov, it is Tigris.

An examination of these two’s interactions with Coriolanus and the ways in which Coriolanus responds to and integrates their influence into his worldview and actions provide a window into his moral decline. They show Coriolanus’s transformation from Coryo into President Snow.

Sejanus and Lucy Gray

If Tigris and Dr. Gaul are the angel and devil on Coriolanus’s shoulders, Sejanus and Lucy Gray are the ultimately unfortunate victims of Coriolanus’s decisions. Sejanus and Lucy Gray are more complex characters than Coriolanus’s moral guides and have their own arcs, but in the context of Ballad’s Coriolanus-centric narrative, they serve as Coriolanus’s foils. Sejanus is Coriolanus’s opposite in nearly every way: District born, new money, and sympathetic to the Districts’ suffering. Lucy Gray contrasts Coriolanus more subtly. She is everything that Coriolanus wishes to be: free, uninhibited, confident enough not to care what others think of her. It is precisely these qualities which cause Coriolanus to seek to control, dominate, and eventually despise her.

On impulse

Ballad’s third person limited viewpoint gives us glimpses into Coriolanus’s thought processes. Coriolanus is analytical to a fault, always weighing the effects his words and deeds have on those around him, and especially on their perception of him. He tends to think and tread carefully. He is also a master of the art of retroactively rationalizing his behavior and that of others. This combination of traits makes him an outrageously unreliable narrator. He projects his own biases and assumptions about human nature on others uncritically, and consistently re-imagines the world around him to establish the rightness of his actions post facto.

This makes Coriolanus’s internal monologue an unreliable tool for analyzing his actual beliefs. Instead, the reader must wrestle with Coriolanus’s ever-changing understanding of his present moment. Objective fact eludes us, and we come away not with Coriolanus’s thoughts but his methods of thinking. We are invited into Coriolanus’s subjective experience of reality.

There are, however, a handful of moments which Coriolanus does not interpret for us, when he acts without premeditation. It is when Coriolanus acts on impulse that we get the clearest look into the values and beliefs at the center of his character.

Analysis

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is structured as a moral decline narrative, but it resists the comfortable arc of tragedy in which a fundamentally good person is destroyed by external forces. Coriolanus Snow is not destroyed. He wins. The question the novel poses is not what happened to him but what was always true of him, and it answers that question not through dramatic confession or villainous monologue, but through the accumulation of small, unguarded moments in which Coriolanus acts before he can think.

These moments are the essay’s primary evidence. Coriolanus is, as a rule, a careful and deliberate actor. He monitors his appearance obsessively, retroactively rationalizes his choices with impressive consistency, and projects his own assumptions about human nature onto everyone around him so thoroughly that his internal monologue is almost useless as a record of fact. What it does record, reliably, is his method of thinking, the grooves worn into his mind by years of hunger, humiliation, and the Grandma’am’s dinnertime mythology. To understand Coriolanus, we must look past his interpretations and attend to his impulses.

Those impulses are instructive. When Coriolanus acts without premeditation, he acts in the service of his own survival and self-image. He reaches for the rose from the Grandma’am’s vase and puts it in his lapel before he consciously decides to. He steps forward to help the dying Arachne not out of compassion but because he does not want to be seen cringing on camera. It is Lucy Gray’s voice that prompts him, but his own vanity that actually moves his legs. Most damningly, when he hears Sejanus speaking treason, he does not deliberate. He records it. He does not weigh the consequences, does not feel the pull of loyalty or guilt, does not reason his way to betrayal. He simply does it, and constructs the justification afterward.

This is the signature of the yetzer hara operating without resistance. The rabbis describe the Evil Inclination not as an external tempter but as an internal voice, one that has been present “from youth” (Gen. 8:21) and whose power lies precisely in its ability to feel like reason, like instinct, like common sense. Coriolanus’s yetzer hara has had a long time to make itself at home. The trauma of near-starvation, the collapse of the Snow legacy, and the Grandma’am’s obsessive mythology of hereditary greatness are not the causes of his evil. They are the conditions in which his yetzer hara flourished unchallenged. They gave it a vocabulary: survival, entitlement, the naturalness of hierarchy, the subhumanness of the Districts. By the time Dr. Gaul arrives to offer him a philosophy, she is not corrupting him so much as articulating what he has already, without examination, come to believe.

Tigris offers a counter-model throughout. She processes the same war, the same hunger, the same fallen name, differently and arrives at generosity, selflessness, and compassion. She is the yetzer hatov made flesh, and she is consistently present, consistently loving, consistently available to Coriolanus as a moral resource. But the yetzer hatov can be overcome by neglect. One does not need to actively choose evil to lose the struggle. One need only fail to cultivate the good. Coriolanus does not reject Tigris’s model; he simply never seriously considers it, because his method of rationalization, projection, and retroactive justification makes moral reflection structurally impossible for him. He cannot receive what she offers because receiving it would require acknowledging, even briefly, that he is not already right.

Lucy Gray represents one last opportunity. In her presence, Coriolanus’s defenses occasionally drop. He mentions his mother unprompted. He drops the handkerchief into the snake tank on impulse, not for the cameras. He experiences something that functions like actual empathy. Lucy Gray is the only character in the novel who consistently acts as though she can see through him, and who, rather than condemning what she sees, tries to draw out something better. She tells him to own it. She asks him to help her. She offers him, improbably, something like love. Coriolanus’s response is to try to own her, to try to manage and contain the freedom she represents, and ultimately to let her go into the wilderness while he persuades himself, with characteristic efficiency, that she was never real to begin with, or that if she was, she would have betrayed him first. The yetzer hara does not need to be dramatic. It only needs to be persistent.

Katniss

Decades later, in the main trilogy, President Snow encounters Katniss Everdeen, and when we re-read it we see the fruits of Ballad’s project of recontextualization.

Katniss is not the opposite of Coriolanus in the way that Sejanus is. Sejanus is his ideological opposite, consciously and articulately so. Katniss is something more unsettling: his structural opposite. Where Coriolanus is analytical, self-monitoring, and deliberate, Katniss is reactive, impulsive, and often bewildered by her own significance. Where Coriolanus’s unpremeditated moments reveal the yetzer hara operating beneath the surface of his careful self-presentation, Katniss’s unpremeditated moments reveal something else entirely.

When Katniss volunteers as tribute, she does not make a decision. She simply moves. When she places flowers around Rue’s body, sings to her, refuses to let the Capitol have her death as mere content, she is not making a political statement. She is doing what her body knows to do before her mind can weigh the consequences. When she holds out the nightlock berries, she is not executing a strategy. She is following an impulse whose logic she cannot fully articulate and will spend the rest of the trilogy struggling to understand.

The rabbis argue that the yetzer hatov can be cultivated through immersive practice, through the internalization of the good until it becomes instinct, until it runs so deep it no longer requires deliberation. Katniss has not studied Torah. But she has been formed, deeply and irreversibly, by love: by her father’s songs, her sister’s gentleness, the solidarities of the Seam. Her impulsive goodness is not innocence or naivety. It is the result of a character shaped, over years, by the consistent practice of care. Her yetzer hatov is not a guardian angel she consults. It is the sediment of a life lived in relationship with other people.

This is precisely what Snow could not become, and what he cannot tolerate in her. He understands manipulation, performance, the careful management of appearances, the tools of a yetzer hara that has been allowed to define a person’s entire relationship with the world. What he cannot understand, and cannot defeat, is someone who acts from the inside out rather than the outside in. Katniss does not calculate the optics of adorning Rue with flowers. She simply loves Rue, and the love moves through her into action. Snow has not experienced this since he was a child who smelled his mother’s rose powder and felt safe. He has spent his entire adult life ensuring he never will again.

The roses are not incidental. Snow’s engineered, genetically perfected roses that smell of blood beneath their sweetness are his answer to his mother’s roses, to Lucy Gray’s songs, to every moment of genuine warmth that his yetzer hara has had to quarantine and contain. They are beauty weaponized, intimacy inverted, the forms of love emptied of their substance and repurposed as instruments of terror. He sends them to Katniss because she is what Lucy Gray was: a reminder that there is a fire he did not steal, that there are people who are free in a way he chose, long ago and without quite realizing it, never to be.

Katniss does not defeat Snow by being stronger or more clever. She defeats him by being, in her impulsive and inarticulate way, more fully human. He has spent his life winning the argument that humanity is savage and self-interested and that the strong must dominate the weak or be consumed by them. She keeps doing things, without thinking, that prove him wrong.

Conclusion

Trauma and dialectics

How do I put this basically enough? It’s a philosophical theory, the kind you might encounter if you took time to read some books. The fundamental premise is to envision history as a sequence of “dialectical” conflicts. Each dialectic begins with a proposition, a thesis, which inherently contains, or creates, its opposite - an antithesis. Thesis and antithesis. The conflict is inevitable.

But the resolution of the conflict yields something new - a synthesis - eliminating the flaws in each, leaving behind common elements and ideas.

— Caesar from Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian Entertainment, 2010.

Montaigne writes: “I must suit my story to the hour, for soon I may change, not only by chance but also by intention. It is a record of various and variable occurrences, an account of thoughts that are unsettled and, as chance will have it, at times contradictory, either because I am then another self, or because I approach my subject under different circumstances and with other considerations” (Montaigne, 1958) The self, for Montaigne, is not a fixed thing to be discovered but a process to be recorded, perpetually in motion, perpetually revising itself.

Trauma interrupts this process. Keightley and Pickering describe trauma as “a condition of individual psychic damage of such severity that the person who suffers from it is unable to make experience storyable and knowable”. In fact, “the distinguishing feature of traumatic experience is its denial or severe inhibition” (pp. 168-170) of the resynthesis by which remembered experience constitutes our successive selves. Trauma does not simply hurt; it freezes. It prevents the ordinary dialectical work of identity formation, in which experience becomes memory, memory becomes meaning, and meaning becomes a self that can continue to grow and change.

Coriolanus Snow is traumatized before we meet him. The war; the starvation; the episode he and Tigris never speak of; and the absolute horror of realizing that he, too, could be viewed as edible are experiences which have not been processed, synthesized, or integrated. They have been sealed. And a sealed wound does not heal; it calcifies. The Grandma’am’s mythology of Snow family greatness, poured into him at every meal across years of watery bean soup, did not give him a story to make sense of his suffering. It gave him a thesis: the Snows are great, the world is unjust, the usurpers must be overcome. This thesis, installed before he had the resources to examine it, became the lens through which every subsequent experience was interpreted.

Hegel’s dialectical model of thesis, antithesis, synthesis describes the normal movement of a developing mind. Thesis encounters antithesis; genuine conflict occurs; something new, richer, and more complex emerges from the collision. But this movement requires the capacity to sit with contradiction, to allow the antithesis to genuinely threaten the thesis rather than simply absorbing and neutralizing it. Coriolanus cannot do this. His method of thinking, the retroactive rationalization, the projection, the instant re-framing of dissonance into confirmation, is precisely the mechanism by which antitheses are defused before they can do their work.

Sejanus is an antithesis. Lucy Gray is an antithesis. Every moment of genuine connection, every impulsive handkerchief in a snake tank, and every unbidden mention of his mother is an antithesis the novel offers him, the raw material of a synthesis that never comes. The yetzer hatov requires this dialectical openness; it requires the willingness to be changed by what one encounters. The yetzer hara, which has dominated Coriolanus so long it has come to feel like reason itself, requires only that nothing new be allowed to stick.

What is most tragic about Coriolanus Snow is not that he was broken by the world. It is that he was offered, repeatedly, the materials for repair, and that his trauma had so thoroughly closed the door on genuine synthesis that he experienced each offering not as an opportunity but as a threat to be managed. He does not become President Snow because evil wins. He becomes President Snow because the ordinary human process of growth, by which suffering becomes wisdom and wisdom becomes compassion, was interrupted early enough and thoroughly enough that the yetzer hara was able to fill the space where a self might have been.

A post-apocalyptic Prometheus

Prometheus has been reinvented and reinterpreted time and again since his entrance into the (extant) literary canon in the 8th century BCE. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that Prometheus is a titan who defies the will of the gods by bringing Fire to humanity.

Prometheus’s identity as a titan is significant. The titans are older and more powerful than the gods, but were overthrown by them. Prometheus is the last remnant of a fallen race and lives now in a social and cosmic order defined and determined by the gods. Prometheus is powerful enough to defy the will of the gods, but not powerful enough to escape punishment. The consequence of his rebellion is to have his liver eaten daily by birds, only to have it regrow to be eaten again ad infinitum.

Coriolanus Snow, too, is the last of a once-great, now-fallen dynasty. The Snows were once among the most powerful of Capitol’s family, but they have been brought low and replaced by a new order of Plinths.

But while Prometheus’s Fire was knowledge, technology, philosophy, and society, stolen from the gods and given to lowly humans, those are not things wanted nor needed by the “lowly” Districts. Snow’s Fire is compassion, kindness, love, and empathy. Snow’s Fire is that indwelling spirit of human goodness which the Districts possess and the Capitol lacks. Prometheus is moved by pity to give Fire to humanity. Snow is unable to be moved by anything but disdain.

When Snow sees the Fire of humanness in Sejanus, he snuffs it out. When he cannot control the Fire of freedom in Lucy Gray, he stifles it. Prometheus is blinded by the temptation of the Fire; Snow is blinded by the status quo, so invested in conforming to the power structure of the gods’ world to even recognize the Fire’s value.

Snow is not a cautionary tale about the corrupting influence of power, or about the ease with which good intentions curdle into tyranny. He is a cautionary tale about the cost of silence, about what happens when trauma goes unspoken and unprocessed, when the yetzer hara is never named and therefore never fought, when the small unexamined choices accumulate so gradually that the person making them never has to face the fact that they are choices at all.

Prometheus gave fire to humanity and suffered for it eternally. Snow withheld it from himself, and lived a long life, and called that living well. What he could not survive was a girl from the Seam who kept giving the fire away without even knowing what she had.

References

Collins, S. (2009). The Hunger Games. Scholastic Inc.

Collins, S. (2011). Mockingjay. Scholastic Inc.

Collins, S. (2014). Catching Fire. Scholastic Inc.

Collins, S. (2023). The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Scholastic Inc.

Keightley, E., & Pickering, M. (2014). The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as creative practice (1st ed. 2012). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Montaigne, M. de. (1958). Essays (J. M. Cohen, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Obsidian Entertainment. (2010). Fallout: New Vegas [PC version]. Bethesda Softworks.

Stein, D. E. S. (Ed.). (2006). The Contemporary Torah: A gender-sensitive adaptation of the JPS translation. Jewish Publication Society.

Steinsaltz, A. (2019). Koren Talmud Bavli (Noe Color Edition). Koren Publishers. https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

Revision History

  • 2026-04-20: Original posting, finally. I’ve been working on this on and off since late 2024.