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Chapter 19. Catching: The Catching
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 the Fetchers enter Catching’s room, Crow—with black hair, brown skin, and brown eyes—knocks First over and breaks Second’s mask, revealing that he has no face. Catching pulls First’s mask off and breaks it as the faceless void beneath screams for his mask’s return. Then the girls run out of the room and face down the Feed with “mirror-eyes,” who’s approaching down the hall. Though the last gray part of Catching wants to flee, she stares at the Feed instead and names the gray: “shame.” She tells him that the gray shame belongs to him, while her colors belong to her, and that she feels proud of “surviving” him. Her last piece of gray vanishes.
Catching and Crow work together to escape the Fetchers, showing the strength and ability to collaborate that their friendship has given them. The Fetchers’ facelessness and Catching’s claim that the grayness belongs to the Feed both imply that abusers are the ones who are truly numb, dead inside, and incapable of change, not their victims. By naming the last gray that she erases “shame,” Catching asserts that the Feed should be ashamed of victimizing her—but she will no longer be ashamed of being victimized. Instead, she feels pride at “surviving.”
Themes
Crow bursts into a song about the Feed’s death, and the Feed runs away. When Crow and Catching corner him at the end of a tunnel, he hits the roof, wounding himself but creating a hole. When he climbs through the hole, the girls follow him into the aboveground world. Catching is stunned by the nature around her. Crow declares herself and Catching “rainbow girls” who will color and be colored by the world.
When Crow and Catching escape, color has returned to the external world. As color symbolizes positive emotions and psychological health, the return of color symbolizes that Crow and Catching’s escape is the final step in overcoming their violent trauma. Crow’s claim that she and Catching will become “rainbow girls” in dialogue with the colorful world means that the full spectrum of positive emotions is open to the girls again, as a result of their resilience and strong friendship.
Themes
Catching sees a far-off light. When she and Crow approach it, they discover a locked cage containing colorful birds and the Feed, grinning. When the birds yell for help, Crow’s hair moves, forming wings and beating to create a wind that breaks the cage door. The birds fly free. As Catching and Crow enter the cage and circle the Feed, he transforms from a monster into a nervous man who no longer has mirrors for eyes because he’s lost his glasses.
Since the Feed eats colors, the caged birds’ colorfulness suggests that they represent other potential victims. In Catching’s dream, the wind seemed to represent Crow, while in this scene, Crow creates wind with her winglike hair—which hints that Crow may be connected to the other mysterious gusts of wind earlier in the book. The transformation of the mirror-eyed Feed into a human man who needs glasses shows that Catching’s story has likely always been an allegory. That is, the Feed abused her so monstrously that she saw him as a monster and chose to explain what he did to her through symbolism, rather than risk retraumatizing herself by sharing literal, explicit details of abuse with Michael and Beth.
Themes
Catching realizes that she’s confronting the Feed not on her own behalf—not anymore—but because someone must end his behavior. She tells him that he doesn’t matter to his victims, though he wants to; in the future, he’ll just be “a bad man we once knew,” and they’ll forget about him. Abruptly, “the world explodes.”
Catching isn’t confronting the Feed simply for her own gain because she and Crow, mutually supporting one another, have overcome the trauma he inflicted on them. Yet because the Feed might abuse others, she still feels a responsibility to stop him. Before she does, she cuts him down to size by telling him that he is not an important character in his victims’ life stories, but only “a bad man [they] once knew.” When “the world explodes,” it suggests that someone—perhaps Crow—has violently destabilized the cage where the Feed was holding the birds captive.
Themes
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