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
Two 10-year-old boys named Benji Mason and Steve Long bike to the fire tower that stands tall above the marsh and forest. Climbing up the steps, Steve glimpses some denim below him in the mud, so he and Benji go investigate, finding Chase Andrews’s dead body. Making their way back to town, they tell Sheriff Ed Jackson what they found, and he asks them to show him. With the two boys and Dr. Vern Murphy, Ed goes to the fire tower and finds Chase lying dead in the muck. Vern estimates that he’s been dead for roughly 10 hours, and Ed speculates that he must have fallen from the fire tower the night before. Both of them know Chase rather well, since the young man used to be a star football player. At the time of his death, he was well-respected and happily married.
The narrative jumps 17 years forward in this section, detailing the immediate aftermath of Chase Andrews’s death. At this point, readers still don’t know what to make of this development. The only thing Owens has revealed is that Chase led a much different lifestyle than Kya, enjoying the privileges of life in Barkley Cove while Kya fended for herself in the harsh conditions of the marsh. How this divide relates to the rest of the novel is as of yet unclear.
Themes
Looking around, Ed notices that there are no footprints in the mud other than the ones Benji and Steve made, along with his and Vern’s. This suggests that Chase was alone when he fell, since his friends would have run to his body if they were there. However, the fact that he might have been alone doesn’t explain why even his footprints are nowhere to be found. Examining the mud, Ed wonders why he can’t see Chase’s journey from the path to the fire tower.
Since Where the Crawdads Sing is a novel that concerns itself with the natural world, it’s worth noting that the circumstances surrounding Chase’s death are out of step with what would normally occur in nature. To that end, the absence of footprints around his body suggests that something strange has happened, ultimately intimating that his death may not have been an accident. In turn, Owens slowly introduces the possibility of violence into the narrative.
Themes
