Suzanne Collins

Prior to the release of Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins spoke to David Levithan, SVP, Publisher and Editorial Director at Scholastic, also one of her editors.

 

 

Please note: This conversation is best read after you've finished the novel, since it does contain spoilers.

 

 

David Levithan: Instead of starting with Haymitch, I'd like to start with the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Can you talk about how you first encountered his writings?

 

Suzanne Collins: My dad introduced me to David Hume when I was a child, along with many other philosophers. He talked about them while using more kid-friendly examples. Like, in Hume's case, sunrises and billiard balls. It was a little mind-bending but always interesting.

 

DL: As signaled in the quotes at the start, in Sunrise on the Reaping you're examining two particular aspects of Hume's philosophy. The first involves the distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. It's at the heart of the initial disagreement we see between Haymitch and Lenore Dove and resonates within the title of the book. Can you talk a little about why you chose to title the book Sunrise on the Reaping, and why what might seem to some to be an absurd question — Is the sun guaranteed to rise tomorrow morning? — actually leads to some of the greater themes of the book.

 

SC: Let's start with the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is top-down logic. It works from the general to the specific. Like, "All human beings need oxygen to survive. I am a human being. I need oxygen to survive." If your premise is true, then your conclusion is correct.

 

But inductive reason goes from the specific to the general. "My cat Zorro loves yogurt. Your cat Fluffy loves yogurt. Therefore, all cats love yogurt." But do they? Your conclusion might be considered probable if you witnessed a bunch of other cats loving yogurt, but it's not a certainty.

 

So, is the sun guaranteed to rise tomorrow morning? David Hume would say no. If you say yes, you're using faulty inductive reasoning. Just because the sun rose yesterday and it rose this morning, there's no guarantee it will rise tomorrow. You can't rely on something happening in the future just because it happened in the past. That's an assumption. You're assuming the future will act like the past. The sun could rise . . . or an infinite number of other things could happen. You can say you feel it's highly probable that it will rise tomorrow based on your observations, but that's as certain as you can get. (Of course, as Haymitch points out about using inductive reasoning, this is kind of how we plan out our lives.)

 

Lenore Dove applies the sunrise idea to Haymitch's certainty that the reaping will always occur on his birthday because it always has in the past. But, in fact, the reaping's only been around for fifty years. And even if it'd been around for a million years, it still wouldn't be a done deal. She wants him to recognize that and accept that the reaping isn't inevitable. Because if he believes it's inevitable, he will never think it can be ended, let alone think that he might be capable of ending it himself.

 

That's where the title came from. Sunrise on the Reaping. Lenore Dove's convinced it's not a certainty. She can imagine a world without it. The future can be different than the past. She makes Haymitch promise that he will fight to make sure there is never another sunrise on the reaping. It becomes his dramatic goal, his mission, and his reason for living. But it takes many years to achieve.

 

DL: This of course ties into a second observation of Hume's regarding implicit submission.

 

SC: If all people do is read this Hume quote and discuss it, this book has been a win for me.

 

"Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular."

 

This quote invites so many questions. Like, "Do you think Hume is right? As human beings, do we ultimately end up being governed by a few people? Not just in, say, a totalitarian state, but in a democracy?" (After thinking about it, every single person I asked about this said yes. No one seemed happy about it.) "But why have we resigned our own sentiments and passions to those rulers? Why are we implicitly submitting to this? Especially since force is on our side, as the governed." Hume answers that for us. We're allowing ourselves to be controlled by "opinion." And that's where propaganda comes in. All right, then, "What propaganda do we all consume on a daily basis that maintains this status quo? Is it harder to maintain in an autocracy or a democracy where we pride ourselves on our intellectual or political freedom? How much propaganda does it take to make you think that implicit submission is what you want? Is it inevitable? Is there a way to protect ourselves against it? What would that entail?"

 

DL: How does implicit submission manifest in Sunrise on the Reaping?

 

SC: Within the story, I'm attempting to have implicit submission play out on three levels: individual, Hunger Games, and national. First, there's Haymitch's personal dramatic arc. Will he defy his own implicit submission to the Capitol and stop that reaping? The second level plays out during the actual Hunger Games. By refusing to demonstrate implicit submission, will Ampert's alliance against the Careers upend the usual results in the arena, allowing a Newcomer to win? Finally, there's the nation of Panem, in which not just the districts but the entire country has ceded power to a dictator and his cronies.

 

At the end of Mockingjay, Panem's in the process of forming a republic. Will that ultimately result in the majority resigning their own sentiments and passions to a handful of rulers? I think life should be better under Paylor than it was under Snow. But I'm sure Snow would say that's the real propaganda and that his rule is more beneficial for the governed. Either way, as a species, are we satisfied with those choices, or have we just never come up with a better alternative?

 

DL: Switching now to Orwell and Blake and the issue of truth, lies, and propaganda. One of the overarching themes of The Hunger Games Series has been the use of propaganda to achieve and maintain power. In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, we see the propaganda war at a very early stage, while in the trilogy we see it at its peak. How would you describe the use of propaganda within Sunrise?

 

SC: Well, as Plutarch says, the Hunger Games are the best propaganda the Capitol has. For Snow, it's the annual Hobbesian reminder of who human beings are in the state of nature and why an authoritarian government is necessary for the survival of the species. They've devised this event in which district citizens kill one another — that way, the Capitol citizens don't directly bloody their hands and the districts are at war. The participants are children, which reinforces the idea that even the most innocent of us are brutal. And it's mandatory viewing.

 

In Ballad, the losses and hatreds of the war were fresh and so the propaganda didn't need to be so heavy-handed. In Sunrise, forty years have passed. A lot of people weren't even alive during the war. Yet every year the entire country is forced to witness this excessively cruel punishment. By the second Quarter Quell, it's a lot more work to keep opinion on the Capitol's side. Now the strategy is to serve up a spectacular Hunger Games while exploiting people's fears with the "No Peace" campaign in order to justify the Capitol's existence.

 

DL: What are the propaganda techniques that most come into play? 

 

SC: They saturate the story, but here are a few examples: Card-stacking (Plutarch's edited District 12 reaping), Fear (the "No Peace" campaign), Transfer (that endlessly waving flag). Whatever it takes to persuade people that the Capitol should control them. As Hume said, "It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded."

 

DL: Another clear influence on the book is Poe. How did you land on "The Raven"?

 

SC: Haymitch's love needed a name. Since she's Covey, that starts with a ballad. I knew she'd died young, as Haymitch mentions this in Mockingjay. So, love of his life + her early death + his relentless grief = Edgar Allan Poe. I'm right back at the Romantic poets again. Even then, I've got several poems to choose from — "Annabel Lee", "Ulalume", "Lenore", "To One in Paradise" —but I couldn't resist "The Raven".

 

For one thing, that rhythm and language just pull you right in, and I believed Haymitch could commit it to memory, especially since it was set to music in the story. Then, of course, the Covey love their birds. The raven's the largest songbird. It can mimic human speech. The raven in the poem's like a jabberjay who recorded one word, "Nevermore," and plays it over and over. Most importantly, there's the tormented lover imprisoned in the chamber of grief with the bird forever casting its shadow on him. That's Haymitch. So desperate to forget, to drown himself in nepenthe. But he doesn't really want to forget his Lenore, and he never really lost her. It takes helping Katniss stop the sun from rising on the reaping to make him realize that.

 

DL: After writing in Coriolanus's voice for Ballad, it must have felt like quite a change to slip into Haymitch's point of view. Can you talk about what it was like to be wearing his voice and how that shaped the book as a whole?

 

SC: After traveling with Coriolanus, who is endlessly manipulative and controlling, it was a relief to wear both Haymitch's voice and character. He has a much greater capacity for hope and love and joy. More than Coriolanus — or Katniss, for that matter. His voice is Seam overlaid with Lenore Dove's Covey influence. There's far more color to his expression, more humor. Sadly, at the end of the book you see his concentrated effort to strip all that away, so by the time you reach the trilogy, his language has lost the musicality of his youth. A combination of his desperation to forget combined with years of Capitol TV erase it. I like to think in his remaining years after the war, he reclaims it. You can hear it coming back in the epilogue.

 

DL: It is a particular challenge to start a novel when you and most of its future readers already know its ending. 

 

SC:  It's another way to approach a story, but it has its advantages. If you look at Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, we learn in the prologue  that the lovers will die. So you're really not focused on what's going to happen, but on how or why it happens. In the same way, you know Haymitch becomes a victor and Snow kills his loved ones, but you don't know the events that lead to these ends. How? Why? Where? What? Who? You have to read the book to find out.

 

DL:  In some of our initial conversations about the book, we talked about whether it would be written in the voice of the older Haymitch looking back or the younger Haymitch processing it as he experienced it. What led you to decide to take the approach you ultimately did?

 

SC: I played around with it both ways, but I found that younger Haymitch speaks directly to the YA audience the best. An older person reflecting back on their youth or shifting into a child's perspective is harder to pull off. Good work, Harper Lee!

 

DL: How do you feel spending so much time in younger Haymitch's shoes has changed your understanding of the Haymitch we see in the trilogy?

 

SC: I don't think it changed my understanding of him — Haymitch is still Haymitch — but it gave me room to explore his earlier journey. Like his relationship to Katniss via Burdock. What it meant to take on his best friend's child and see her through the war and become her surrogate father. It was nice to have some time with that angle.

 

DL: Like the other Hunger Games books, there is a clear three-part structure in place here, with each part getting the same number of chapters. How does this structure help you shape the story?

 

SC:  I began as a playwright over forty years ago, and that dramatic structure became the template for the novels. Since I've worked with it for decades, it's almost second nature, and that allows me to spend my energy elsewhere. This is the tenth book I've used this structure for, so I know certain things I want to achieve by certain points in the story. If I haven't achieved them, something isn't working the way I hoped, and I probably need to pause and figure out why.