Character Profiles
Katniss Everdeen - First, the moly plant. The moly is a tuber that Hermes gives to Odysseus as a cure for any of Circe's poisons in Homer's Odyssey. It is described as "black at the root, but with a milky flower. The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods have the power to do all things" (Odyssey, Book X, II. 304-306). Black at the bottom, white at its top, and ungraspable as a whole except by a divinity, the moly plant's power is in its being a resolution of contraries and image of the kosmos and Godhead (see Romans 1:20).
Katniss' father told her "as long as you can find yourself, you'll never starve" (Hunger Games 52). Her mother is city, her father is country. She is an attractive woman but she has been father, provider, and protector of the Everdeen survivors since her father's death. Like the mockingjay, a hybrid of genetic manipulation and mutation in the wild, she is a living harmony of Culture/Nature, masculine/feminine, healer/killer.
The polarity of her loves —Gale, the wind or Nature icon, and Peeta, sacramental bread of sacrifice and artisan of beauty and meaning, the Culture icon — cannot be resolved because she is their resolution and each sustains her. This is noted by the first two Scholastic covers which make quite a point of this symbiosis with the Mockingjay symbol locked to two other circles.
Peeta Mellark - 'Peeta,' the man of town and "Boy with the Bread, has a name that means bread (pita as well as a vocation as a bread baker. In a world named "Bread' (Panem is the accusative case form of the Latin word for Bread), Peeta or 'Peter' is an icon of the Christ, the world creator, Who in St. Peter's church at least, is received as Bread, and Who loves the world and every soul in it sacrificially. As a child, he gives two loaves of bread to Katniss that he purchases sacrificially (he is beaten for it by his mother), bread which saves her from physical starvation and the eating of which immediately inspires her to think of her Family Book' and the means to provide for her mother and sister. His bread, in effect, saves her.
Like the Canaanite woman in the Gospel narratives who begged crumbs from Christ's table like a dog (cf., Matthew 15: 21-28) and the Prodigal Son who was reduced to eating with pigs in his estrangement from his father (cf., Luke 15:16), so Katniss is reduced to searching the baker's trash and to despair at the fence of a pig sty (Games 29-30).
Peeta is the suffering Christ whose sacrifice is given to those living in His mystical Body, the Church, as bread for the illumination of their hearts and minds (see Luke 24: 13-35 about the eye-opening effect of sacramental bread). Katniss eats Peeta's "hearty" bread and looking to him sees the promise of the resurrection, "rebirth instead of destruction," in the Paschal light of first life in the spring. Though his gift of sacrificial love, she remembers the Father who can only be known through Christ (cf., John 14:6) and his words, those she has learned from him herself and in his book. This book is a story cipher for scripture.
In Mockingjay Peeta remains the long-suffering Christ that he was in Games and Fire but not one that atheists or devotional Christians would recognize if their idea of Christ is restricted to a sentimental image of the Jesus of Nazareth from stained glass windows. The Mockingjay Peeta is the Christ as the World sees him, a murderer hung on a tree, foolishness to the wise, and a scandal to the righteous. He judges his followers and calls them to turn from the world. Most striking, he calls believers to remember him as he would remember them and to serve him by loving him in those people who least resemble him.
Gale Hawthorne - Gale, the man of the woods, free and unbound except for his family obligations, is an embodiment of Nature, a 'gale force wind' of spirit and the experience of natural beauty. His relationship with Katniss is platonic despite their spending years in each others company and both leading lives deprived of touch and love.
Mr. Mellark - Peeta's father is another story stand-in for God the Father. He loved Katniss' mother (Games. 300), call her 'Eve,' and reaches out to Katniss by visiting her after the first Reaping with a gift of cookies. He has "no words at all" (Games. 37-38; note the difference between the silent father and his his eloquent son whose words have magical effects), except that he will "keep an eye on the little girl" and feed her. His assurance that he will be watching over Prim relieves "the pressure in my chest" (ibid).
Mr./Ms. Everdeen - Katniss' father, Mr. Everdeen, is the 'God the Father' of the story. He is never named in the book which corresponds to the human incapacity to know God in His essence or to name Him per se. She loves him and remembers her time when she hunted with him in the forest surrounding District 12. Everything she knows that makes her different comes from her time with him, the period in her life that corresponds with Adam and Eve's time "walking and talking" with God in Eden (Genesis, Chapter 3). The song that her father teachers her is "The Hanging Tree,' which corresponds to the Tree of Life or World Axis and Cross of Calvary, what in Genesis is called 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.'
Katniss' father departs from the story and she is betrayed by her mother, who retreats into something like catatonic shock at his absence. This disappearance and betrayal is the beginning of the Hunger Games story in several ways because it reflects the Fall of Man both in Eve/Mrs. Everdeen's part in it and the agony of Adam and Eve in a life apart from God's company and presence. Man, of course, is not left without a means of returning to the Garden and life with God. The Garden of Eden or Paradise, is Collins' story Meadow that Katniss sings about to Rue in Games and in her Mockingjay Capitol battle.