Quote 1
What they want is for me to truly take on the role they designed for me. The symbol of the revolution. The Mockingjay. […] I won't have to do it alone. They have a whole team of people to make me over, dress me, write my speeches, orchestrate my appearances – as if that doesn't sound horribly familiar – and all I have to do is play my part. (1.28)
Here it seems like Katniss is still being manipulated by others to fulfill a greater purpose. Before, she was deployed like a doll by the Capitol, and now she's being used in the same way to give a face to the group attempting to destroy the Capitol. In both cases, she's "play[ing a] part" that someone else wrote.
Quote 2
Yes, other people had plans, I think. Has Peeta guessed, then, how the rebels used us as pawns? How my rescue was arranged from the beginning? And finally, how our mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, betrayed us both for a cause he pretended to have no interest in? (2.25)
From a statement like this, we can tell how hard it has become for characters like Katniss and Peeta to trust anybody. The current regime that governs the Capitol and organized the Games obviously can't be trusted. But the revolutionaries also cannot really be trusted. And even Katniss and Peeta's "mentor," Haymitch, the one person they could try to rely on to get them through the games, lied to them all along.
Quote 3
Another force to contend with. Another power player who has decided to use me as a piece in her games, although things never seem to go according to plan. […] But she [President Coin] has been the quickest to determine that I have an agenda of my own and am therefore not to be trusted. She has been the first to publicly brand me as a threat. (5.1)
No matter what she does or how hard tries, Katniss keeps ending up in the same darn position. Over and over again, she becomes someone else's tool, manipulated for someone else's ends. She always seems to be hopping from one bad situation to another. Just when she thinks she's safe, she's in more danger than ever.
Quote 4
When I confront Plutarch, he assures me that it's all for the camera. They've got footage of Annie getting married and Johanna hitting targets, but all of Panem is wondering about Peeta. They need to see he's fighting for the rebels, not for Snow. And maybe if they could just get a couple of shots of the two of us, not kissing necessarily, just looking happy to be back together […] (18.4)
It seems that nothing is real. Everything, whether actual or staged, is manipulated to serve the cameras' purposes. That was true during the Games, and it's true outside of them. Can Katniss even trust Plutarch? Immediately, Katniss makes it clear that she finds this last suggestion repugnant. It seems there are some lines she still won't cross.
Quote 5
In the quiet that follows, I try to imagine not being able to tell illusion from reality. Not knowing if Prim or my mother loved me. If Snow was my enemy. If the person across the heater saved or sacrificed me. With very little effort, my life rapidly morphs into a nightmare. I suddenly want to tell Peeta everything about who he is, and who I am, and how we ended up here. But I don't know how to start. (19.52)
Through empathy, Katniss is finally able to understand the dire straits Peeta is truly in, and to forgive him. But she's so overcome by feeling that she doesn't know what to do now. She can imagine only too easily what it would be like to be hijacked the way he has been. He's been locked in a "nightmare" for way too long. How will she ever get him out?
Quote 6
I'm not with Snow now. I'm in Special Weaponry back in 13 with Gale and Beetee. Looking at the designs based on Gale's traps. That played on human sympathies. The first bomb killed the victims. The second, the rescuers. (25.40)
It's a cruel twist of fate that makes the weapon Gale designed the one that killed Prim and so many other young children. Katniss had doubts about the humanity of the tactic, and then to be confronted with the ramifications of it is nearly unbearable. She knew this kind of weapon was being manufactured. She just never expected her own side would use it to such effect.
Quote 7
This is what they've been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale's traps and adapting them into weapons against humans. Bombs mostly. It's less about the mechanics of the traps than the psychology behind them. […] Gale and Beetee left the wilderness behind and focused on more human impulses. Like compassion. A bomb explodes. Time is allowed for people to rush to the aid of the wounded. Then a second, more powerful bomb kills them as well.
"That seems to be crossing some kind of line," I say. (13.41-42)
Katniss recognizes here that, in some regards, what her side is doing is no different from what the other side in the war is doing. Both are losing sight of compassion and morality in their attempts to win the war. Katniss is shocked to witness such deliberate cruelty and planning, and to realize it comes from people she loves and respects.
Quote 8
Someone joins me, his body tense. Finnick, of course. Because only a victor would see what I see so immediately. The arena. Laced with pods controlled by Gamemakers. Finnick's fingers caress a steady red glow over a doorway. "Ladies and gentlemen..."
His voice is quiet, but mine rings through the room. "Let the Seventy-sixth Hunger Games begin!" (18.15-16)
They might be in a middle of war, but that's what Katniss and Finnick have already been subjected to, over and over. Only being in the prior Games could have prepared them to see this war for what it is: another "arena." The Gamemakers they feared so much in the previous sets of Games have reappeared. They are, in some senses, right back where they started.
Quote 9
However, the true atrocities, the most frightening, incorporate a perverse psychological twist designed to terrify the victim. […] The smell of Snow's roses mixed with the victims' blood. Carried across the sewer. Cutting through even this foulness. Making my heart run wild, my skin turn to ice, my lungs unable to suck air. It's as if Snow's breathing right in my face, telling me it's time to die. (22.46)
What kind of war are Katniss and the others fighting, when their opponents are so cruel and inhumane? The kinds of "atrocities" they face are stunning. In their context, it's a little more understandable how someone like Gale could be pushed into devising inhumane traps himself.
Quote 10
The little girl who was watching me kneels beside a motionless woman, screeching and trying to rouse her. Another wave of bullets slices across the chest of her yellow coat, staining it with red, knocking the girl onto her back. For a moment, looking at her tiny crumpled form, I lose my ability to form words. (24.51)
This is a taste of the awfulness of the battle that's about to come. Innocent people are dying. Children are dying. And Katniss can't do anything to stop it. To make matters worse, there's no one side of the fight that's good and one side that's evil. Both sides are acting without compassion and are using inhumane tactics in their attempts to win the war.
Quote 11
But what he's said makes no sense. When they released the parachutes? "Well, you really didn't think I gave the order, did you? Forget the obvious fact that if I'd had a working hovercraft at my disposal, I'd have been using it to make an escape. […]" (25.37)
Katniss is horrified by the discovery that the deaths of those children and her sister were not caused by Snow. That's right – the people on Snow's side didn't slaughter those children. This atrocity was committed by the rebels she's been fighting alongside.
Quote 12
The authorities in District 13 were against my coming back. They viewed it as a costly and pointless venture, given that at least a dozen invisible hovercraft are circling overhead for my protection and there's no intelligence to be gained. I had to see it, though. So much so that I made it a condition of my cooperating with any of their plans. (1.3)
This quotation shows that Katniss is both powerful and powerless. She's being asked to be the face of the revolution and, as such, she has a certain amount of power. Yet she can't just go do anything she wants. In order to go back to District 12, she has to bargain with the other powerful individuals and give them something in return.
Quote 13
It isn't enough, what I've done in the past, defying the Capitol in the Games, providing a rallying point. I must now become the actual leader, the face, the voice, the embodiment of the revolution. The person who the districts—most of which are now openly at war with the Capitol – can count on to blaze the path to victory. (1.28)
Even though Katniss is being asked to step forward as "the actual leader," her power will still be limited. She'll be like a glorified figurehead, a "rallying point" around which other people will come together. She'll <em>appear</em> to have tremendous power and to become the "embodiment of the revolution" itself, but she won't actually be the one making decisions – that's President Coin.
Quote 14
"Punishing my prep team's a warning," I tell her. "Not just to me. But to you, too. About who's really in control and what happens if she's not obeyed. If you had any delusions about having power, I'd let them go now. Apparently, a Capitol pedigree is no protection here. Maybe it's even a liability." (4.30)
Perhaps even more dangerous than not having any power is thinking you have power that you don't. Katniss can see this more clearly than Fulvia; previous power isn't translating to power in the current regime. In fact, it can actually mark out someone as even more dangerous.
Quote 15
A new sensation begins to germinate inside me. But it takes until I am standing on a table, waving my final good-byes to the hoarse chanting of my name, to define it. Power. I have a kind of power I never knew I possessed. Snow knew it, as soon as I held out those berries. Plutarch knew when he rescued me from the arena. And Coin knows now. So much so that she must publicly remind her people that I am not in control. (7.35)
Here is where Katniss's "power" starts growing inside her, like a flower. Everyone else has known all along: all the other people in positions of power and authority recognized that same power in her. She's the only one who didn't. In other words, she didn't know her own strength, but now she's beginning to find out. And that only makes her more dangerous.
Quote 16
Maybe it's because I still have the ashes of my own district on my shoes, but for the first time, I give the people of 13 something I have withheld from them: credit. For staying alive against all odds. (2.82)
Katniss realizes here that she hasn't given "credit" to the folks in 13 who have been struggling for their lives just as she has been struggling for hers. In some ways, they had as tough a time making it in 13 as she did in the arena, and she hasn't given them enough respect for that.
Quote 17
"That's great," I say. Prim a doctor. She couldn't even dream of it in 12. Something small and quiet, like a match being struck, lights up the gloom inside me. This is the sort of future a rebellion could bring. (10.72)
Here, Katniss is able to recognize one of the things they're fighting for – the rebels, and thus a new and brighter "future." It's just a "small" feeling of courage inside her, but it's a chance for hope, for possibility. As terrible as the events they've gone through are, there might be something better on the other side after all.
Quote 18
"Anyway, it's not like an actual Games. Any number of people will survive. We're just overreacting because – well, you know why. You still want to go, don't you?"
"Of course. I want to destroy Snow as much as you do," he says.
"It won't be like the others," I say firmly, trying to convince myself as well. Then the real beauty of the situation dawns on me. "This time Snow will be a player, too." (18.26-28)
It takes a special kind of courage to enter into a version of the Games for a third time. Most folks are too terrified to even make it through one. Katniss and Finnick have already had to endure two, and it's a miracle they both made it through those alive. Here, it's hard to know whether Katniss is really "convinced" by her rhetoric or not. More people might survive, but more people will probably die, too.
Quote 19
I kneel beside Boggs, prepared to repeat the role I played with Rue, with the morphling from 6, giving him someone to hold on to as he's released from life. But Boggs has both hands working the Holo. He's typing in a command […] A green shaft of light bursts out of the Holo and illuminates his face. (20.6)
Boggs has just had both legs destroyed in a bomb. He's dying, and in a terrible way. Yet he still clings to life to accomplish one final task as a soldier and serve his cause by giving control of the Holo to Katniss. If he doesn't do so, it will be unusable. The fact that Boggs can put aside the incredible pain and terror of dying to focus on his duty shows just how courageous he is.
Quote 20
Having no work, grief buries me. All that keeps me going is Coin's promise. That I can kill Snow. And when that's done, nothing will be left. (25.15)
Katniss can only carry on because of one thing: the idea that she "can kill Snow." She can stay present and focused because of that goal, but that's it. Her courage will only take her that far. Once she's accomplished that last mission, she'll collapse back into her "grief."