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Chapter 41
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Where the Crawdads Sing, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival, Necessity, and Violence
Independence vs. Human Connection
Education, Coming of Age, and Adulthood
Prejudice, Intolerance, and Acceptance
Summary
Analysis
The county jail is attached to the courthouse and is where Kya has been staying ever since Ed and Joe arrested her at Jumpin’s. Since then, she has languished in the half-darkness of the cell, yearning for the outdoors. When she stands on a crate, she can just barely see out the one window and turn her head toward the marsh. As she does this, she remembers an Amanda Hamilton poem about a gull with a broken wing, which ends with the couplet, “A broken heart cannot fly, / But who decides the time to die?”
Perhaps the worst thing for Kya about spending two months in jail is the fact that she’s forced into isolation but doesn’t get to enjoy the kind of freedom that she normally associates with being alone. For somebody who covets her individualistic lifestyle but also yearns for human connection, this is the worst possible combination. Left to her own devices, she has nothing to do but think about the marsh and recite poems about death, clearly considering the fact that a jury will ultimately decide whether or not she lives.
Themes
