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Chapter 10. Beth: The Deaths
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Catching Teller Crow, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Grief
Abuse of Power, Racism, and the Law
Storytelling and Truth
Time
Female Friendship
Summary
Analysis
When Catching wakes, a voice greets her. When she asks who it is, the voice—hiding in a room’s shadows—sings an eerie song about a “dead girl” and “one more for the Feed.” Catching demands the voice’s name. It offers to trade. When Catching introduces herself, the voice introduces itself as Crow. Catching asks Crow to come out of the shadows. Though Crow warns Catching that it will be scary, Catching suggests that Crow hiding while “singing creepy songs” is scarier. Crow moves slowly into the light; she’s a girl with inward-turning feet and unnaturally long nails whose skin, hair, and eyes are all gray.
Crow’s song about a “dead girl” seems to imply that something called “the Feed” plans to kill Catching. An intelligent girl, Catching understands the implication and derides Crow’s song as “creepy.” Previously, gray has symbolized emotional numbness or collapse due to grief or trauma. As such, Crow’s monochromatically gray appearance implies that she has been traumatized and may feel emotionally numb as a result.
Themes
Crow asks whether Catching is afraid. Catching says no: Crow is “a girl” like Catching. Crow retorts that they aren’t the same: Catching has colors—at least until “they” arrive. When Catching asks whether Crow means the Fetchers, Crow says the Fetchers just work for the Feed, who devours the “colours that live in our souls.” Catching realizes that Crow wasn’t always gray; the Feed ate her colors. She asks how long Crow has been captive, and Crow replies that she’s been there “since the Feed began,” trying to aid the other girls. When Catching demands help escaping, Crow suggests that the only escape is death. Crow returns to the shadows, hiding as First and Second appear. They toss Catching bread, which paralyzes her when she eats it.
In Catching’s fantastical story-world, colors, which have previously symbolized positive emotions and psychological health, can be devoured by monsters like the Feed, rendering their victims gray, a shade that represents trauma and emotional paralysis. If readers take Catching’s story literally, Crow’s explanation suggests that the Feed eats everything good “that lives in our souls” till its victims die; figuratively, the Feed seems to represent predators or abusers whose actions destroy their victims psychologically. Crow’s total grayness and her claim that she’s been in the tunnels “since the Feed began” hints that she may be a ghost. Her claim that she’s been trying to help the other victims (all girls) suggests that she is trying to befriend and aid Catching in her own way—and thus that she is the “beneath-place” friend Catching mentioned to Beth.
Themes
