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
In the courtroom, Eric questions Ed, who recounts finding Chase’s body and explains why he thinks the young man’s death wasn’t an accident, emphasizing that there were no footprints surrounding his body. Furthermore, there were no fingerprints on the fire tower, indicating that somebody wiped the scene of the crime clean. When it’s Tom’s turn to question Ed, he points out that Chase’s footprints might have been washed away by the rising tide, since this often happens in the marsh. Considering this possibility, Ed agrees that it could have happened. Furthermore, Tom shows the jury the tide table for the night Chase died, and it reveals that the tide would have risen at some point after his fall. He then criticizes Ed for not experimenting to see if it would be possible for a set of footprints to completely disappear with the tides.
While questioning Ed, Tom destabilizes his credibility by scolding him for jumping to conclusions. Indeed, the prosecution’s main evidence in this case is actually the absence of evidence, since Ed has based his suspicions not on clear indications that Kya killed Chase, but on the fact that there were no fingerprints or footprints at the scene of the alleged crime. That Ed and his colleagues use this lack of concrete evidence to suggest Kya killed Chase only emphasizes how eager they are to pin the murder on the easiest possible target—which is, of course, Kya.
Themes
Going on, Tom shows the jury a letter written to the U.S. Forest Service several months before Chase’s death. The letter urges the Forest Service to either close the fire tower or make the hatches safer, stating that somebody might fall through the hatches and die because they’re left open so frequently. When Tom asks Ed who wrote this letter, the sheriff is forced to admit that it was him.
Tom further attacks Ed’s logic by showing the jury that the sheriff himself has long been worried about an accident like this taking place. Now that it has happened, though, Ed has rashly drawn conclusions about Kya, getting swept up in the excitement of placing blame on an outsider and basing the majority of his suspicions on her mysterious reputation as the “Marsh Girl.”
Themes
