A Character Analysis of Coriolanus Snow
The President of Panem is much deeper than people realize
“Oh my dear Miss Everdeen, I thought we agreed not to lie to each other.”
Even now, whenever I come across that line in “The Mockingjay” I still get chills down my spine. President Coriolanus Snow, to me, is not just one of the best villains in modern literature, but one of the greatest characters written. Ever.
Body
In typical hero versus villain media, the villain is bluntly evil. What I mean here is that it’s unambiguous, that they exist to be defeated by the hero. Examples of this are Voldemort from “Harry Potter”, Thanos from the “Avengers” and even Randall Flagg from “The Stand”. There’s no real depth to these characters, they’re driven by one goal and are always reaching for power or death for the sake of them.
Snow on the other hand is much more nuanced and conniving. In “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” we see that he does have friends, even if for dubious reasons, and that he does act in some cases morally right or morally gray areas. He expresses concern for his classmate Clemensia after she is bitten by Doctor Gaul’s mutts and even (if only for a brief moment) seems to truly care - and like - Lucy Gray from District 12. Sure, he’s driven by the need for the Plinth Prize, but the relationship between the two crosses between the typical mentor/tribute dynamic.
Snow is driven by control in the extreme. He does not seek destruction or annihilation, and already has the power that drives the typical literary villain. He views the Hunger Games as a means of keeping the nation together, that without it, humanity would revert to a state of chaos. In a way, he seeks to preserve human life, not destroy it.
We see more undertones of this in “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”. Here is a brief exchange from Snow’s class at the Academy:
LYSISTRATA: If the war is over, then technically the killing should be over, shouldn’t it?
FESTUS: I’m beginning to think it will never be over. The districts will always hate us, and we’ll always hate them.
GAUL: Let’s consider for a moment that the war is a constant. The conflict may ebb and flow, but it will never really cease. Then what should be our goal?
SNOW: We control it.
During the paragraph between the exchange between Gaul and Snow, he goes on to say that Tigris, his cousin, was right about avoiding the Gamemaker, but Gaul calls on him and pressures him to answer. He already knows the answer, claiming it’s “So obvious. Too obvious.”
In order to prevent the end of the nation and humanity itself, which to Snow exist in a constant state of war, then some form of highly centralized authority must exert power over the masses. Otherwise the whole system collapses. Again, he says so in “Catching Fire” when he visits Katniss. This is the same chapter where they both agree not to lie to each other.
SNOW: In several of them [the districts], however, people viewed your little trick with the berries as an act of defiance, not an act of love. And if a girl from District Twelve of all places can defy the Capitol and walk away unharmed, what is to stop them from doing the same? What is to prevent, say, an uprising?
KATNISS: There have been uprisings?
SNOW: Not yet. But they'll follow if the course of things doesn't change. And uprisings have been known to lead to revolution. Do you have any idea what that would mean? How many people would die? What conditions those left would have to face? Whatever problems anyone may have with the Capitol, believe me when I say that if it released its grip on the districts for even a short time, the entire system would collapse.
KATNISS: It must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down.
A few lines later, Katniss says that she didn’t mean to start any uprisings and Snow says he believes her. In this sense, and for a lot of “Catching Fire”, Snow and Katniss do not act like traditional adversaries. They come to some sort of agreement: convince Panem that Katniss and Peeta’s love is real to stop a revolution. Katniss doesn’t want a revolution either. She’s not a career who loves the Games or a revolutionary like Alma Coin, she just wanted to save her sister. This contrasts with other villains who seek no end to destroy the hero, much less work with them.
One might argue that Doctor Gaul is the real cause of the main events in “The Hunger Games” trilogy, that Snow was just a side effect of her teaching. It’s hard to say without her backstory. He adopts her philosophy of control. When Snow leaves the arena with Sejanus Plinth, the two have what I consider the best dialogue exchange in the novel.
GAUL: What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.
SNOW: Are we really as bad as all that?
GAUL: I would say yes, absolutely. But it’s a matter of personal opinion. What do you think?
SNOW: I think I wouldn’t have beaten anyone to death if you hadn’t stuck me in that arena!
GAUL: You can blame it on the circumstance, the environment, but you made the choices you made, no one else. It’s a lot to take in all at once, but it’s essential that you make an effort to answer that question. Who are human beings? Because who we are determines the type of governing we need.
After Gaul first speaks, expressing her thoughts on mankind, Snow is shocked and even attempts a laugh, as if the whole thing is funny.
This just brings up the idea that Snow was not born a villain, but rather made by the environment he grew up in. Voldemort, Thanos, and Flagg were born evil, they were destined to be villains, there was no redeeming them. Snow could have been good. Snow instead adopts Gaul’s Hobbesian approach of a more absolute sovereign within the social contract, that the Hunger Games are necessary. Hobbes further says that mankind has the right to do anything to protect oneself and that we exist in a natural state of war against everyone else and that only a strong central government can ameliorate this state.
Sejanus Plinth, formerly of District 2, offers a more liberalist view. Often the dissenter, Plinth argues that the districts are being treated too harshly and that the Games are not a proportional response, that they’re punitive in nature.
PLINTH: You’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. No right to take away their life and freedom. Those are things everyone is born with, and they’re not yours for the taking. Winning a way doesn’t give you that right. Having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does.”
Here, Plinth is taking a more liberal approach, channeling John Locke who said that everyone had a natural right to “life, health, liberty, or possessions”. Locke believed that the creation of a civil society would resolve conflicts with the help of the government, ameliorating the need for a constant war. Interestingly, Locke also believed that revolution was not just a right, but in some cases an obligation.
Where Gaul and Hobbes believe that people are wicked and evil, Locke counters this saying that everyone is born with a tabula rasa (empty mind) and is shaped by our experiences. In political philosophy, Locke says that by gaining civil rights, we accept the necessary obligation to respect the rights of others by giving up limited freedoms and that legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed.
Plinth has his shortcomings too, but he acts as foil to Snow and Gaul. Snow and Plinth were genuine friends, even though in the beginning Snow resented him for his District 2 roots. While originally angry that the Games would continue, Snow convinces him to work within the system to help the districts and to even abolish the Games altogether. This is similar to what Dean Casca Highbottom does, who abhors the games but is still the gamemaker. Plinth tries this, enlisting as a peacekeeper with Snow in District 12. He switches this philosophy, engaging with Billy Taupe to leave the system all together.
This ties back to Snow and his belief of control. By leaving the system, they return to the Hobbesian state of nature, where it’s a war against all, and if one group of people leave, what would stop the rest of them? Especially given the brutality of the games. This extends to Lucy Gray, who wasn’t even a part of the system and claims no real allegiance to the Capitol, Panem, or District 12. She too represents the state of nature, she doesn’t play by the rules.
This reinforces Snow’s belief of the Games being necessary to counteract mankind’s natural lawless state, that humanity needs absolute control.
The dichotomy between Snow and Coin is interesting too. We know that Snow believes in Hobbes’ argument, that all his actions are purposeful and deliberate. When Katniss visits him at the end of “Mockingjay”, he states the following about the bombing of Capitol children.
SNOW: So wasteful, so unnecessary. Anyong could see the game was over by that point. In fact, I was just about to issue an official surrender when they released those 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. But that aside, what purpose could it have served? We both know I’m not above killing children, but I’m not wasteful. I take life for very specific reasons. And there was no reason for me to destroy a pen full of Capitol children. None at all.
However, I must concede that it was a masterful move on Coin’s part. The idea that I was bombing our own helpless children instantly snapped whatever frail allegiance my people still felt to me. There was no real resistance after that. Did you know it aired live? You can see Plutarch’s hand there. And in the parachutes. Well it’s that sort of thinking that you look for in a Head Gamemaker isn’t it? I’m sure he wasn’t gunning for your sister, but these things happen.
My failure was being so slow to grasp Coin’s plan. To let the Capitol and districts destroy one another, and then step in to take power with 13 barely scratched. Make no mistake, she was intending to take my place right from the beginning. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it was 13 that started the rebellion that led to the Dark Days, and then abandoned the rest of the districts when the tide turned against it. But I wasn’t watching Coin. I was watching you, Mockingjay. Any you were watching me. I’m afraid we have both been played for fools.
When Katniss says that she doesn’t believe him, Snow utters his last words in the novel, “Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other.”
That’s a lot all at once, so let’s work through why Snow is truthful here. From the “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” we know Snow is methodical, every action he takes serves some purpose to further his idea of control. He does not take life for frivolous reasons, he genuinely thought Lucy Gray, Sejanus, and Highbottom were threats to current order, he needed to eliminate them to maintain that fragile state. A dramatic bombing live on air? That serves no purpose in fact it weakens Snow by severing the social contract between him and the masses.
He even acknowledges his fault in not keeping an eye on coin and District 13, he’s not prideful or ignorant, he doesn’t say something to the effect of “well, they got lucky”, no - he recognizes that Coin was the true threat to his rule, not Katniss who wanted nothing to do with the rebellion.
A brief aside on Coin and Gale Hawthorne. Both are blunt killers, they take life for the purpose of taking life; very ‘ends justify the means’ type of people. Coin, by killing Capitol children, Gale, by saying killing a human is no different than killing an animal and with his idea of killing everyone inside District 2’s Nut.
Katniss reflects on the brutality of Gale’s plan in “The Mockingjay”: ‘Gale has no interest in preserving the lives of those in the Nut. No interest in caging the prey for later use. This is one of his death traps’. Even when it becomes apparent that the workers in the Nut are civilians, Gale says: ‘So what?’ before going on about how District 12 wasn’t given the luxury of surrender. Gale is bent on harsh revenge, revenge that is not justified. If the powerbrokers of the Games were in the Nut, then yes, it may have been justified, but against civilians? Not a chance.
Coin wants power for the sake of power. She intends to keep perpetrating the Hunger Games not to keep order like how Snow perceives, but to instill fear. The rebellion bound together people like Coin, but also people like Paylor, who seem to actually want a republic.
Conclusion
Collins said that the idea for “The Hunger Games” came to her while channel suffering between reality television and coverage of the War in Iraq. To me, that’s why “The Hunger Games” will stand the test of time because it’s truly applicable to the world we currently live in. It warns against the rise of autocracy and the surveillance state. Since 9/11, we’ve seen mass surveillance in the form of the PATRIOT Act exposed by Edward Snowden, the treatment of humans in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and even in domestic prisons; the increasingly militarization of police forces who act without any real repercussions other than ‘administrative leave’; the high defense spending because it is “necessary” to maintain the current world order, a world order that’s shifting every day; the sensationalization of violence through mass shootings and serial killers.
I’m not saying that we’re Panem or that Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden are our Snow, but I am drawing these connections to demonstrate what a slippery slope we can find ourselves on. How much of our freedoms, our rights are we willing to give up for security? Will we feel each marginal push towards authoritarianism or wake up one day to a nation with no elections or freedoms? In our Games, who are we willing to kill to stay alive, how much dissent and chaos will we tolerate?
Before I finish, I want to say this: Coriolanus Snow is not a good person, because I feel like what I am writing may be equated to fondness or love. I am simply admiring the depth and complexity of the character.
What makes Coryo, to his cousin Tigris, so fascinating is this depth and complexity laid out in this paper. I truly believe he is one of the great literary characters of our time, even if he is a villain. Suzanne Collins did such a phenomenal job crafting his character and his story arc.
About the Author: A born and raised Wisconsinite living on the East Coast, Alex is a bibliophile through and through. He enjoys fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and political thrillers. Alex has a Bachelors degree from Marquette University and is currently attending the University of Maryland for his Master of Public Policy degree. He lives in the outskirts of Washington, D.C.