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Chapter 17. Catching: The Two
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
Catching has no idea how much time has passed, but more and more of her is becoming gray. One day, Crow cries over Catching’s grayness. Catching makes Crow say the relationship words with her. Eventually, Catching falls asleep and dreams that she’s on a green hill covered in colorful wildflowers, where she encounters a group of girls. The girls tell Catching that Crow is engaged in the wrong struggle: “You can’t fight feeling with not-feeling!” Catching realizes that these are the dead girls; they tell her that she’s almost dead too. When Catching wonders whether death would be so bad, a violent wind lifts her into the sky. A girl below calls out that Catching must name what she’s fighting to defeat it with its “opposite.”
Crow’s tears over Catching’s grayness reveal that she has been emotionally affected by her friendship with Catching, despite her self-presentation as a dead, unfeeling girl. When Catching receives advice from the Feed’s previous victims—that “you can’t fight feeling with not-feeling” but only with its “opposite”—the scene reveals two things. First, the Feed’s victims are a kind of sisterhood, a band of female friends trying to protect one another against their shared abuser. Second, emotional numbness and dissociation (“not-feeling”) are ultimately not a helpful response to traumatic pain (“feeling”). Instead of dissociating, Catching and Crow need to find their pain’s “opposite”—one of the positive emotions represented by the intense colors in Catching’s dream.
Themes
Catching wakes up to Crow screaming her name. When Catching covers her ears, she realizes that her arms weigh almost nothing and she’s nearly dead. Crow calls herself stupid, asking why she revived Catching when Catching was dying. Catching laughs at the irony of Crow, who wants Catching to become a dead girl, saving Catching’s life. Then she notices that a few strands of Crow’s hair have turned black. Catching, overjoyed, says aloud that colors can come back after they’ve been stolen.
A wind carried Catching out of her dream; since Crow woke her up in the real world, readers can infer that the dream-wind represented Crow’s screaming. Crow no longer wants Catching to die—though she believes that dying is the only way for Catching to escape the pain of the Feed’s predation. Since intense colors like black symbolize positive emotion in the novel, whereas gray represents grief, trauma, and emotional numbness, the black strands in Crow’s hair suggest that her friendship with Catching has given her back some emotional capacity after violent abuse numbed and “deadened” her.
Themes
Crow, terrified of feeling emotions, starts plucking out the black strands of her hair. When Catching tries to stop her, Crow shouts that Catching and “words” caused this to happen. She slashes Catching’s arm with her nails, drawing blood. Crow is shocked: she thought she couldn’t hurt anyone or affect anything, any more than she could feel. Catching tells her that she’s becoming more powerful, having regained one of her colors. Crow goggles at her hands, “as if she’s only just realized what hands can do.”
When Crow claims that Catching and “words” have brought her colors back, it suggests that not only Catching’s friendship but also Crow’s memories of loved ones (whose relationship words she has been reciting with Catching) are helping her heal from her traumatized emotional deadness. Her new ability to affect the physical world after regaining her colors hints that emotions are ultimately a source of strength, not a weakness. Since Beth, a ghost, can only influence the physical world when she’s feeling strong emotions, this scene is another hint that Crow is a literal ghost.
Themes
Catching asks whether she’s regained any color. When Crow says no, Catching remembers when Crow told her that each person has their own gray. She wonders whether that means each person has “their own way to get colours back.” Recalling the dead girl in her dream who told her to name what she was fighting, Catching wonders whether the gray has another name. She stares at her arm where the gray first took hold and names what she was feeling when it happened: “despair.” Immediately, the gray gets paler. Catching thinks that the opposite of despair is “hope,” but the part of her that used to hope has been damaged.
Gray symbolizes trauma and emotional numbness, while intense colors symbolize positive emotions and psychological health. In that context, Catching’s speculation that everyone has “their own way to get their colours back” means that everyone heals from trauma, grief, and so on in their own way: there’s no one-size-fits-all healing process. In Catching’s case, she needs hope to heal, but she believes that the abuse she has suffered has compromised her ability to hope.
Themes
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Catching begins to cry. Then, suddenly, her great-great-grandmother’s name, Trudy Catching, pops into her head. She remembers her mother telling her how white colonization stole Trudy Catching’s agency, but Trudy still preserved her sense of self, drawing resilience from her family and community. Internally, Catching recites the names of the Catching women, from Trudy to herself. Hope grows inside her, becoming a fire that burns the gray fingermarks off her arm. She can see a “blue vein” through her skin.
Again, the novel parallels the Feed’s predation on girls to white colonial attacks on Aboriginal ways of life, suggesting that both are unjust abuses of power that traumatize their victims. Despite Aboriginal woman Trudy Catching’s lack of power in a culture controlled by white colonists, she maintained her identity through her connections with her loved ones—a detail that emphasizes the importance of community to surviving trauma. Trudy’s example of resilience gives Catching enough hope to remove the gray on her arm that represents “despair.”
Themes
Crow, examining Catching’s wrist and her own hair, says aloud that Catching isn’t dead and she herself isn’t gray. Then she asks, “No one comes?” Catching understands: Crow used to believe that girls needed to be “dead inside” to cope with the Feed taking their colors, that grayness was permanent, and that no one would arrive to fight the Feed. Now Crow knows that the girls don’t need to be dead inside and grayness isn’t permanent, which makes her wonder whether someone will fight the Feed. Catching says that she and Crow will reverse their gray and “stop the Feed.”
Crow told herself stories about the necessity of numbness and death to deal with her traumatic reality. Catching’s friendship and her example of resilience have revealed to Crow that the stories she told herself were false. Realizing the truth—that someone can “stop the Feed”—gives Catching and Crow the courage to fight the Feed themselves.
Themes
