Gray vs. Intense Colors Symbol Analysis

In Catching Teller Crow, the color gray symbolizes unhealthy psychological paralysis caused by trauma and grief, whereas intense colors—yellow, green, blue, black, red, and so on—represent a psychologically healthy capacity for joy and growth despite traumatic experiences. This symbolism plays out most obviously in the story that Isobel Catching tells police detective Michael Teller and his 15-year-old daughter Beth, a ghost. Catching, having undergone a hugely traumatic experience, refuses to narrate what happened to her in direct, literal language. Instead, she tells Michael and Beth that she was kidnapped by fantastical beasts, winged and faceless, called Fetchers, who held her captive while two monsters called Feeds slowly and violently devoured all the colors in her body, turning her gray. Her only friend in captivity, a gray ghost named Crow who was the Feeds’ first victim, initially encouraged her to become gray and dead as a way of numbing her pain. It was only after Catching realized that she could banish the gray and regain her intense colors by summoning positive emotions, such as memories of courage or hopeful dreams of the future, that she regained the psychological strength to escape and confront the Feeds. The novel later reveals that the monstrous Feeds were, in fact, local rich man Alexander Sholt and police chief Derek Bell, who have been kidnapping, holding captive, and eventually murdering teenage girls for approximately 20 years. Given this context, the novel strongly implies that Isobel’s “turning gray” represents the aftermath of repeated sexual assaults by two violent adult men, a trauma that for a long time paralyzed her and Crow, preventing them from fighting back. It is only once Catching and Crow help each other regain their intense colors—that is, claw back a sense of their capacity for growth—that they can recognize their own power to fight back, escape their abusers, and move on from what happened to them.