"Snow lands on top."
This is something of a Snow family motto for Tigris and Coryo: the "saying that had gotten them through the war" (Ballad, 9), as the two cousins recollect early in the novel. Though loaded with reassurance and a pleasing sense of inevitability, this mantra varies in tone, context, and implication as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes progresses. "Snow lands on top" appears early on, when Tigris is contemplating her family's poverty and Snow is eager to excel as a mentor. These are inspiring words for difficult circumstances, but by the final time the motto appears—in the Epilogue, with Coryo victorious and increasingly vicious—a Snow has in fact landed on top and has succeeded in crushing plenty of other people.
"...at eighteen, the heir to the once-great house of Snow had nothing to live on but his wits."
Here, we are told that Snow is only eighteen, and we are led to contemplate the differences between the wealthy dictator of the later Hunger Games trilogy and the earnest young Coryo we see here. His kindly mother and his domineering father are dead, and he doesn't have their fortune—or any fortune—to benefit him, since his family's resources were lost in the rebellion with the presumed destruction of District 13. Now, Snow must use his wits and cunning to escape his situation. Thus, the book sets up Coryo's need to restore his family's name as one of the character's central motivations. Readers of the final trilogy may know the end result of Snow's life, but the task of connecting this impoverished young man to the well-heeled, sociopathic President Snow offers plenty of intrigue.
Bombs and blood. That was how the rebels had killed his mother. He wondered if they had killed Lucy Gray's, too. "Just like her pearly white bones." She seemed to have no love for District 12, always separating herself from it, saying she was, what was it . . . Covey?
Is the bond between Snow and Lucy mainly based on self-interest or on genuine affection? While a romance between an aristocrat from the Capitol and a wandering musician may seem to have a shaky foundation, Snow's early reflections indicate that he feels some sympathy for Lucy. Their shared experience of the war is one of loneliness and displacement. Still, as Snow's need to excel takes precedence, his connection to Lucy becomes more complicated. The idea that Lucy has "no love for District 12," for instance, will later be deployed by Snow in discussions and interviews meant to appeal to Capitol sponsors. Of course, construing Lucy as non-District may help her popularity and her odds of winning, but it is impossible to separate Snow's bond with Lucy from his own determination to improve his life.
"There is a point to everything or nothing at all, depending on your worldview."
Throughout The Ballad, Dr. Gaul presents Coryo and the other students with items of political philosophy, often in order to explain her own views of power and control. Here, her contrast between a "point" and "nothing" plays into a few of her larger ideas. Authoritarian though she is, Dr. Gaul sees the power of the Capitol as serving a useful point in rescuing Panem from chaos. On another level, the situation that provokes this comment - Coryo and Clemensia observing Dr. Gaul's multicolored snakes and wondering if there is a "point" to the coloration - reveals that the idea of purpose extends well beyond vast political constructs in the novel. Dr. Gaul's rainbow snakes serve a direct point in making the Hunger Games a stark spectacle, and they serve a narrative point in connecting Lucy with one of her symbolic animals in the arena. It is clear what worldview Dr. Gaul would endorse.
He'd loved the unfamiliar sense of safety that their defeat had brought. The security that could only come with power. The ability to control things. Yes, that was what he'd loved best of all.
Here, Coryo is completing an assignment for Dr. Gaul on the rather twisted topic of what he liked about the war, and he is proving just how compatible Dr. Gaul's authoritarian worldview is with his own. Of course, Coryo's reasons for disliking the Districts are not purely sociopathic. The warfare caused his family real suffering and gave him the impression that, despite his apparent intelligence and his potential for decency, he was, for a time, fundamentally helpless. Still, is it reassuring "security" or maniacal "power" that really appeals to Coriolanus? On the basis of the later events of his life, his desire for control and power becomes twisted beyond understandable self-preservation and into open villainy.
All right, so he'd dropped the handkerchief with Lucy Gray's scent - the one from the outside pocket of his book bag - into the snake tank. He'd done it so they would not bite her as they had Clemensia. So they would not kill her. Because he cared about her. Because he cared about her? Or because he wanted to win the Hunger Games so that he could secure the Plinth Prize. If it was the latter, he had cheated to win, and that was that.
The narration of The Ballad is by no means indirect about the moral dilemmas that Coryo encounters. Here, the narrative explicitly raises the question of whether he desires Lucy's safety or a personal win more, underscoring this theme with sentences that are identical but for a single unit of punctuation: "Because he cared about her. Because he cared about her?" At this point in the novel, it is possible to read a single action as doubled-sided and Coryo's confusion as genuine. By the end, however, he will decisively choose his future over Lucy, reaching a level of self-interest that he doesn't definitively attain in this scene.
"The Hunger Games are an unnatural, vicious punishment. How could a good person like you be expected to go along with them?"
There are a few Capitol citizens who object to the Hunger Games in a principled manner, though not all of them speak out as sharply as Sejanus Plinth does. Among the mentors, Lysistrata Vickers seems to harbor real compassion for her tribute, and Coriolanus himself is troubled - at least for a time - by the fact that he kills a tribute while escaping the arena. Tigris's own objections are, from one perspective, surprising. Though related to a Capitol loyalist (her grandmother) and a future authoritarian (her cousin), she finds the games miserable and believes that Coryo does the same. Her judgment of Coriolanus may be flawed and her idea may not quite fit her family's sympathies, but it does in fact fit her later characterization as the eccentric rebel sympathizer who helps Katniss Everdeen roughly 65 years later.
"If I'm helping to kill people in the districts, how is it any better than helping to kill them in the Hunger Games?"
In part, Sejanus's decision to become a Peacekeeper was meant to remove him from a Capitol milieu that he never found appealing. Nonetheless, this quotation reveals that Sejanus is in an impossible position. If becoming a Peacekeeper - ideally, a Peacekeeper doctor or medic - was meant as a form of escape and a route to atonement, then Sejanus's new approach has led him down the wrong path. He is forced to help an institution that executes rebels without trial and that, for the most part, is willing to let the Districts remain in disrepair - beyond providing the Capitol with resources, that is.
"I think there's a natural goodness built into human beings. You know when you've stepped across the line into evil, and it's your life's challenge to try to stay on the right side of that line."
With this quotation, Lucy alludes to one of the central conflicts of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, perhaps unwittingly. She does not know the full extent of Coriolanus's evil (his betrayal of Sejanus, for instance) or his potential for evil at this point, but her words remind the reader that the struggle between viciousness and decency is a central part of Coryo's characterization. Lucy, again without quite knowing it, is also articulating a worldview that contrasts with the other grand construct for "human beings" in the novel: Dr. Gaul's theory. Where Lucy sees people as fundamentally good but needing to keep evil in check, Dr. Gaul sees people as inherently destructive and needing a positive sense of order to avoid chaos.
"You don't think I've invested all this time in you to hand you off to those imbeciles in the districts, do you?"
Here, Dr. Gaul reveals that, in her own supremely self-interested way, she holds Coriolanus in high regard. He is a fantastic investment, and his time in District 12 has proven that he can thrive even in conditions of deprivation and uncertainty despite his Capitol pedigree. Dr. Gaul's own Capitol elitism is on display in her reference to the "imbeciles" from the Districts. How much, however, did Coryo really learn from his time in the Districts? His stint as a Peacemaker is construed as a necessary toughening in The Ballad, but the events of the later Hunger Games trilogy suggest that Coriolanus comes to underestimate those District "imbeciles" at his own peril.
