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
Ed and Joe go to the Dog-Gone Beer Hall to listen to what the townspeople are saying about Chase’s death. At one point, a shrimper named Hal Miller pulls Ed aside and tells him that he and some of his fellow crew members were coming into shore on the night of Chase’s murder when they saw a boat speeding toward the fire tower. The person driving that boat, Hal thinks, was the “Marsh Girl.”
Now that readers know that Kya and Chase had a relationship and that Chase cheated on her during this time, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Kya is in fact the person who murdered him. One of the only questions that remains, then, is whether or not Kya is actually the kind of person who would violently lash out at somebody for wronging her, though it’s also possible that she killed Chase (if indeed this is what happened) out of necessity in a moment of self-defense.
Themes
