The latest addition to The Hunger Games universe, Sunrise on the Reaping, shifts the focus from Katniss Everdeen to Haymitch Abernathy, offering a more nuanced engagement with themes of rebellion, solidarity, and the meaning of family. The original trilogy often presents revolution as corruptible and ultimately hopeless, culminating in Katniss’s retreat into private life. However, Sunrise on the Reaping offers an alternative: a vision of political commitment that emerges from and is sustained by personal relationships, without collapsing entirely into the logic of privatized domesticity.

In The Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss is shaped by her experiences of survival, trauma, and love. Her actions such as volunteering for Prim, forming a bond with Rue or refusing to kill Peeta emerge from deeply personal motivations. Though they take on symbolic meaning, she remains ambivalent about being the face of a collective movement. This hesitation is not a moral flaw but a reflection of how the narrative itself frames political movements with suspicion. The rebellion, while justified, is portrayed as tainted from within: Gale becomes morally compromised, President Coin reveals herself as authoritarian, and the lines between liberators and oppressors blur.

Katniss herself supports the rebellion before the circumstances force her to realise its futility. The narrative imposes the equivalence between rulers and rebels but there are small moments of recognition on the part of Katniss that reveal how clear her own commitment to the revolutionary movement might have been:

“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… Their early years must have been terrible, huddled in the chambers beneath the ground after their city was bombed to dust…Over the past seventy-five years, they’ve learned to be self-sufficient, turned their citizens into an army, and built a new society with no help from anyone…Maybe they are militaristic, overly programmed, and somewhat lacking in a sense of humor. They’re here. And willing to take on the Capitol.”

Here, Katniss sees value in collective effort and acknowledges the political labour of District 13. The critique that she makes of the insurrectionary structure is advanced not as an abstract moral condemnation but as an attempt to understand how people organize themselves in harsh conditions. This is radically different from an anti-political attitude that has a premature suspicion towards any revolutionary project. The novel allows her only brief moments of such clarity, but they reveal a deeper possibility beneath her usual anti-political persona.

Daniel Zamora observes that Collins’ anti-political portrayal of revolution aligns more closely with the ideas of François Furet than those of Karl Marx. Furet, a historian of the French Revolution, argued that all revolutions inevitably slide into terror and dictatorship. In the Hunger Games universe, this logic is reflected in the equivalence drawn between Snow’s authoritarianism and Coin’s radical egalitarianism. The message becomes clear: the problem is not which side holds power, but the very act of holding political ideals. The narrative thus warns against revolution itself, suggesting that any attempt at collective transformation is doomed to reproduce violence and domination.

The ending of the trilogy reinforces this anti-political vision. Katniss chooses to withdraw from political life entirely, returning to District 12 to start a family with Peeta. The epilogue is notably silent on the political future of Panem. We are told only that the Hunger Games have ended which is a symbolic gesture, but not a systemic transformation. The revolution, it seems, was a means of restoring liberal democracy and privatized peace, not of reimagining society. Earlier in the book, Katniss herself critiques this liberal ideal when she reflects on the failures of her ancestors, whose democratic systems led to environmental collapse and endless war: “a system which clearly did not care about those who came after.” Yet even with this awareness, the story offers no political alternative. The final choice is one of retreat from revolution, ideology, and collective action.

Haymitch Abernathy and the Politics of Care, Memory, and Grief

However, Sunrise on the Reaping challenges this framework. Through Haymitch, the novel presents a different understanding of political consciousness. Unlike Katniss, who fights for her family, Haymitch fights with his family and community. His backstory reveals that rebellion is not post-ideological. On the contrary, it is grounded in a belief in justice, solidarity, and the collective power of memory. This form of resistance is intergenerational, communal, and deeply rooted in lived experience. Families like the Abernathys and the Chances are marked as “seditious” by the Capitol. There are rumors that Haymitch’s own father died trying to sabotage the mines. When Woodbine Chance is reaped, Haymitch reflects on how the entire family is notorious for rebellion and has lost more members to the rope than even the Abernathys. As Woodbine runs, his family shouts encouragement and tries to shield him from the peacekeepers.

For Haymitch, family is closely tied to rebellion, and its meaning extends beyond traditional definitions. When Louella, his thirteen-year-old fellow tribute, dies before the Games begin, he says he never had a sister but would have wanted one just like her. Earlier, when Maysilee weaves a necklace for Ampert, Ampert tells her that he wishes she were his sister. She responds by saying that she will be his sister, showing that family is not defined by blood alone. Later, after Maysilee saves Haymitch’s life and they are eating together, Haymitch asks her if she will be his sister. As Haymitch says,

“What do you say to the meanest girl in town who’s become your friend? No, more than a friend, really… Being tributes and not killing each other . . . looking out for each other with no questions asked . . . that’s family, I guess.”

Through Haymitch, the story begins to ask a different question: what if family and grief were not escapes from politics, but its very foundations?

Haymitch ends up winning the Hunger Games, though his original plan had been to take his own life after destroying the arena. The consequences of his victory are devastating. His mother and younger brother are burned alive by the Capitol. The love of his life, Lenore Dove, is also killed. Left entirely alone, Haymitch begins to isolate himself from anyone who might still care for him, knowing that their love might doom them too. Though he is asked to rejoin the rebellion, the magnitude of his loss silences him. He falls into alcoholism and solitude, because even though he believes in the cause, the weight of grief overwhelms any remaining hope. Over time, this grief is erased from collective memory. He is reduced, in the public eye, to a bitter drunk who sends children to their deaths as their mentor. The personal becomes depoliticized, and his pain is stripped of meaning.

Yet Haymitch’s grief is not apolitical, and it is inaccurate to suggest that he simply “gave up” for personal reasons. In Sunrise on the Reaping, the boundary between personal and political is deliberately blurred. Haymitch recognizes that grief, too, is a political condition. In a world where mourning is produced by state violence and war, healing itself becomes a form of resistance. His eventual return to the rebellion, after twenty-three years, is not a sudden act of redemption but the culmination of a long, painful political process. And yet, when he does re-enter the story in Mockingjay, the narrative flattens his complexity, presenting him as someone who merely manipulates Katniss and reinforcing the trilogy’s suspicion of revolutionary actors. This portrayal feeds into the broader skepticism of organized rebellion that runs throughout the original series.

This is especially jarring given how Haymitch first enters the rebellion. He does so with clear intent, rather than by accident or through coercion. During his own Games, he joins a rebel plot to destroy the arena. It is a conscious, collective act of sabotage. He fights alongside others with the goal of weakening the Capitol’s hold. His rebellion is not spontaneous, nor reluctantly symbolic, but organized and committed. And because the logic of The Hunger Games universe views collective political action as inherently suspect, it is destined to fail. Even when characters act with conviction and clarity, the narrative punishes them. His suffering and defeat reinforce the idea, which is woven throughout the series, that revolution is ultimately futile.

But Haymitch’s character resists this conclusion. Though he returns to District 12, his journey is not the same as Katniss’. He does not choose private life over politics. Instead, his return continues the work of radicalizing the meaning of family. He allows himself to love again through solidarity. He forms bonds based not on blood but on shared history and struggle. He reclaims grief and transforms it into remembrance, writing a book dedicated to the fallen. As he reflects: the Capitol never truly took Lenore Dove from him because ‘nothing it could take from him was ever worth keeping’.

These are the lines of a Covey song. Earlier in the book, Haymitch reflects that these words are boldly arrogant, yet there are several things the Capitol can take from him. In fact, his family is the only thing he has. He even loses his dignity and humanity because of the Capitol. But in the epilogue, he accepts the truth of this song because, even though in reality these things can be taken away, the entire point is to fight for those who came before. This is similar to what Beetee does, because he cannot let down Ampert’s memory after his death. Haymitch continues to believe in the politics of care and remembrance. His embrace of the song marks a transformation of the rebellion into a quieter, enduring form. Even in a world that claims to have moved beyond revolt, Haymitch keeps alive its emotional and ethical core. He continues to imagine a political community rooted in love, memory, and resistance, even after the revolution has been institutionalized and its radical edge blunted. His grief becomes his politics, and in choosing to remember, he refuses to forget what the Capitol destroyed and what the rebellion once dreamed of building. He uses the terms family, friends, and comrades-in-arms interchangeably, reflecting his desire for this ideal of a political community grounded in care.

The Refusal of Sunrise: Rethinking the Revolution

Even the title Sunrise on the Reaping suggests a shift in ideological tone from the rest of the series embodied in the character of Haymitch. Earlier in the book, Haymitch says that the Hunger Games will keep happening just as sure as the sun rises everyday but Lenore Dove says that it isn’t certain that the sun has to rise every day. Haymitch is incredulous so she tones down her assertion to say that it is possible that the sun may not rise on the reaping. However, it is her original assertion that is significant because while Haymitch does prevent the sun rising on the reaping, the entire point is to go beyond that.

Lenore refuses the logic of inevitability. In Suzanne Collins’ world, revolutions tend to repeat the systems they fight which is a bleak vision aligned with François Furet’s claim that revolutions inevitably end in tyranny.  For Lenore, the sun is not a symbol of hope, but of repetition. Its rising signals the reappearance of the same structures under different names. To imagine that the sun may not rise is to imagine an end to the cycle itself. It is to imagine the birth of something radically different instead of a new version of the old world. A liberal reading treats the sunrise as a sign that things can improve, that democracy might prevent another reaping. A radical reading interprets the sunrise as a symbol of continuity, where the foundations of class, spectacle, and violence remain intact.

Although the sun is often seen as a symbol of hope, many writers use it negatively. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, the sun is described as either scorching or dimmed, suggesting that even nature’s brightest force fades or becomes unbearable. In Camus’s The Stranger, its blinding heat drives Meursault to commit murder. In the myth of Icarus, it melts his wings and causes his death. In Langston Hughes’s Harlem, the sun dries up a dream “like a raisin,” showing decay. Kanafani uses sun imagery to reflect pain, loss, and the harsh political realities faced by his characters. Lenore stands in that tradition. Her refusal is revolutionary: not all light is liberation, and not all dawns are worth waiting for.

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