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Chapter 18. Catching: The Dream
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
In the shadows, Crow repeats the false things she used to believe about her own powerlessness—and laughs at them. Catching likes Crow’s method of removing grayness, but hers is different: she must identify the feeling her gray represents and fight it. She finds a gray that represents fear, recalls a time she stood up to a school bully, and erases the gray with her remembered courage. Then she pictures herself and Crow in the future, free on a beach, and uses that imagined happiness to erase a gray piece of misery. Catching doesn’t know how long this process takes; she measures it not by clock-time but by “the distance between who we are and who we’re turning into.”
Crow and Catching have very different methods of regaining their colors from the grayness, which symbolizes the emotional harm that traumatic violence has done to them. The difference between the two girls emphasizes again that healing from trauma is not a one-size-fits-all process: everyone heals differently. When Catching says that she measures time by “the distance between who we are and who we’re turning into,” she asserts that personal growth is a truer measure of time for a person than clock-time is.
Themes
