Two Days Until Publication of Sunrise on the Reaping! The Day After Tomorrow!
Tonight, as promised, I want to take a closer look at the second “Sneak Peek” preview excerpt from Sunrise, this one read by Suzanne Collins. Tomorrow I pledge to write up my notes about what we know about the plot of the fifth Hunger Games novels based on the revelations in the first four with citations of those passages. Looking at these notes, I have to wonder if any book published has ever had so much of its plot already in the public record before its publication. We already have much more in hand than either or both of the pre-pub “Sneak Peeks” have shared.
As with yesterday’s review of the opening pages of Sunrise, I will provide the transcript (one posted by UnHolySir) passage and then my notes behind bullet points.
A few of the geese hiss to announce my arrival. Lenore Dove’s was the first face they saw when they hatched, and they don’t love anyone but her. But since I’ve got corn, they’ll tolerate me today. I toss it a ways away to call off her bodyguards and lean in to kiss her. Then I kiss her again and again, and she kisses me right back.
- We have another echo here of the Hunger Games opening in which Katniss shares her Buttercup the cat relationship history.
- To anticipate tomorrow’s post, Lenore Dove’s goose-keeping and the centrality of Haymitch’s love for her with respect to how he lives the rest of his life is something we know about from one of the last paragraphs in Mockingjay: “We learn to keep busy again. Peeta bakes. I hunt. Haymitch drinks until the liquor runs out, and then raises geese until the next train arrives. Fortunately, the geese can take pretty good care of themselves” (387).
- We’ll be talking about the symbolism of geese and their use in mythology and literature as it plays out in Sunrise.
“Happy birthday,” she says when we come up for air. “Didn’t expect to see you until after.”
She means the reaping, but I don’t want to talk about it.
“Hattie let me go early,” I tell her. “Gave me this too. A present for my big day.”
I pull out the bottle.
- There’s a gap here between the first preview passage at his home and Haymitch’s meeting with his true love, Lenore Dove. The plan per the first passage (and Miss Dove’s expectation, too) was that he would meet up with Lenore after the Reaping Day ceremony and his filling the Abernathy family cistern so his mother can wash the miners’ clothes.
- All indications here are that he went to work for a moonshiner (?) named ‘Hattie,’ his meeting in the woods near dawn, she let him off early and with a birthday present, and he took the opportunity to run to Lenore’s. The corn presumably came from Hattie’s corn mash stock.
- Why did they cut to the scene from Lenore? Either there’s a big reveal in that brief passage or the Scholastic Gamesmaker-Marketers elected to cut to the romance of the book, the Star-Crossed lovers, Haymitch and Lenore.
- Again the reverse echo of Haymitch and his booze and geese life per Mockingjay’s last chapter.
“Well, that won’t be hard to trade, especially today. Besides New Year’s, today’s when most people get drunk. Four kids, though, that’s going to hit a lot of families.”
I guess we’re going to talk about it.
“It’s going to be all right,” I say.
Which rings hollow.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“Maybe not, but I try to. Because the reaping is going to happen no matter what I believe. Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.”
- Lenore isn’t interested in the bottle of hooch except as a commodity to be traded for something valuable. If Haymitch shares her indifference to alcohol, we have a starting point for his transformation from sober man to lush.
- Haymitch, too, is shown here as a young man who refuses to invest himself in future events over which he has no control, things that are ‘outside his sphere of influence.’ His “the reaping is going to happen no matter what I believe” is a marker of both an adolescent fatalism (“Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow”) and of, I can’t believe I’m saying this, psychological maturity.
- Haymitch, though, in our ‘first meeting’ with him in the prequels is clearly someone who prefers conversations with his True Love Lenore Dove not be spent discussing heady or sad subjects. Another marker of his ‘character arc.’
Lenore Dove frowns.
“Well, there’s no proof that’ll happen. You can’t count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. It’s faulty logic.”
“Is it?” I say. “Because it’s kind of how people plan out their lives.”
“And that’s part of our trouble — thinking things are inevitable. Not believing change is possible.”
“I guess. But I really can’t imagine the sun not rising tomorrow.”
- Collins has said that she was inspired to write Sunrise by a passage from David Hume about how the few hold power over the many by the latter’s “implicit submission.” Hume is not best known for his political philosophy; as a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. he is most remembered especially among academy philosophers for his radical skepticism. From the Hume Wikipedia page:
- Hume elaborates more on [the principle of cause and effect], explaining that, when somebody observes that one object or event consistently produces the same object or event, that results in “an expectation that a particular event (a ’cause’) will be followed by another event (an ‘effect’) previously and constantly associated with it”.[85] Hume calls this principle custom, or habit, saying that “custom…renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past”.[30] However, even though custom can serve as a guide in life, it still only represents an expectation. In other words:[86]
Experience cannot establish a necessary connection between cause and effect, because we can imagine without contradiction a case where the cause does not produce its usual effect…the reason why we mistakenly infer that there is something in the cause that necessarily produces its effect is because our past experiences have habituated us to think in this way.
Continuing this idea, Hume argues that “only in the pure realm of ideas, logic, and mathematics, not contingent on the direct sense awareness of reality, [can] causation safely…be applied—all other sciences are reduced to probability”.[87][30] He uses this scepticism to reject metaphysics and many theological views on the basis that they are not grounded in fact and observations, and are therefore beyond the reach of human understanding.
- Lenore Dove uses Humean logic — and his distinction between thinking of what normally happens as an expectation rather than definitive cause-and-effect — to argue that there might someday be a better world, that “change is possible.” Collins takes Hume’s idea of “implicit submission,” though, and the connection between propaganda, controlled narratives, and conventional, prevalent opinion to generate that “submission” as the “custom” that prevents change.
- I think it’s safe to say that Lenore Dove’s almost certainly tragic demise at the end of Sunrise (see tomorrow’s post for that) will be the author’s commentary about the extremes to which power holders will go to control the metanarrative (and police free speech by categorizing contrary opinions as “disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation“).
A crease forms between her eyebrows as she puzzles out a response.
“Can you imagine it rising on a world without a reaping?”
“Not on my birthday. I never had one that came without a reaping.”
I try to distract her with a kiss, but she’s determined to make me see.
“No, listen,” she says earnestly. “Think about it. You’re saying today is my birthday and there’s a reaping. Last year on my birthday, there was also a reaping. So every year there’ll be a reaping on my birthday. But you have no way of knowing that. I mean, the reaping didn’t even exist until fifty years ago. Give me one good reason why it should keep happening just because it’s your birthday.”
- Lenore Dove is spot on in her Humean logic and perhaps more than a little naive about the cost of overturning custom for idealist reasons. Her demand for “one good reason,” if we move beyond the connection with Haymitch’s birthday, is that he wants the two of them to live to see their next birthday.
For a girl who’s quiet in public, she sure can talk up a storm in private. Sometimes she’s hard to keep up with. Lenor Dove is always patient when she explains stuff—not superior—but maybe she’s just too smart for me.
Because while it’s a fine idea, thinking about a world with no reaping, I don’t really see it happening.
- In brief, Haymitch is a pragmatist who can follow his best girl’s arguments and appreciate her idealism (“fine idea”) while grasping intuitively that overthrowing the political order of Panem — the subjection of the Districts to the Capitol, a regime most easily represented by the annual Hunger Games — will come at an ungodly cost.
- Haymitch’s aside, “but maybe she’s too smart for me,” is a marker about their profound differences in how they encounter the world. He’s obviously head over heels for the girl, but he seems to sense that their relationship is not going to end well.
Conclusions:
This was a much meatier “Sneak Peak” than the first preview, no?
I suspect that Haymitch’s ‘attack the narrative parameters’ strategy in the Quarter Quell arena, one that he probably didn’t get from his mentor, was inspired by his conversations with Lenore on Reaping Day and in their last conversation before he departs for the Capitol.
Tomorrow we’ll go through all we are told in the first four Hunger Games novels about Haymitch’s time in the arena and the consequences of his victory there — and maybe I’ll share some things we’re almost certain to see and some off the wall guesses. See you then!
