Katniss Everdeen Character Analysis

Katniss Everdeen is not yet worthy of being a leader due to her fault or her inability to have an intimate relationship and trust with other people. She has learned not to expect much from people and refuses to allow herself to appear weak. Rue comes along and becomes much more than an ally to Katniss. She becomes the teacher Katniss needs. We see her start to grow and develop throughout the games. Shaping herself into become more and more of the leader that people of Panem see in her. Katniss is paranoid. She has profound trust issues, and cannot accept help from anyone. These issues take root at young and continue to fester as she gets older. After her father died, at the age of eleven, Katniss is left to pick up the pieces and become the

She forms a constant resentment towards her mother, “All I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones” (8). Her relationship with her mother is only the start of the list of people she perceives to always let her down. Peeta Mellark, a young son to the owner of the bread maker, made an honest mistake towards Katniss. He helped her in a time of weakness and starvation, “He threw a loaf of bread in my direction” (31). This small act from him saves her and her family’s life, reminding her of her perfect hunting skills. Katniss struggles with this and has a hard time trying to understand why he would do that: why would somebody risk being hurt for her? Katniss can never quite trust Peeta’s motives, fearing that he is just playing the nice guy. She won’t allow herself to believe he will not kill her,

As Mary Pharr and Leisa Clark state in their “Introduction” in Of Bread, Blood, and The Hunger Games, Katniss has never had a probably with being a skilled killer: “Born into poverty but also born with the natural instinct of both a survivor and a hunter” (12). She needed somebody to basically teacher her how to become human, something other than a skilled killer. To function on, at the very least, a basic level of humanity, which up until Rue she had yet to do. Rue begins to create this intimacy that Katniss has really never experienced with someone. To heal her tracker jacker stings Rue needs to put chewed up leaves on the wound. Katniss not only allows for Rue to put her saliva on her, but pleads for more, “’Do my neck! Do my cheek!’ I almost beg” (201). She even finds Rue snuggling up against her. We see that Rue has put her trust completely in Katniss, “by the way she bounces up, you can tell she’s up for whatever I propose” (210). Rue risked her own life, leaving her safety amongst the tree tops, by doing what Katniss asked of her. According to Guy Risko in his essay “Katniss Everdeen’s Liminal Choices and the Foundations of Revolutionary Ethics” in Of Bread, Blood, and The Hunger Games, Katniss’s decision to bury Rue with flowers in the arena was not only an act of defiance, but opened the idea of a greater society: “We grow in sympathy and compassion for more of the human family,