Setting, And Imagery In Where The Crawdads Sing By Delia Owens

In the novel Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens presents symbolism, setting, and imagery in order to highlight the way that Kya was treated, ultimately illustrating that peoples origins can be unusual from others and affect how people form relationships as well as who they each individually turn out to be.
In this day of age, growing up different from someone else is not unusual. People are more accepting and welcoming than they were ever before. If anything, people like it more now if you are different from everyone else. We, as a world, have grown into loving people for who they are, not how they were raised, what they look like, or what they have. However, this novel takes place in the 1900s when people were not as accepting as they

Each family member leaves one by one, but one remains. The only one that remains is the gulls. The gulls are considered family to her because of the love she has for them and how they have always been consistent and have never left her. She knows that the only thing that can relate to her is nature, “If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would. Drifting back to the predictable cycles of tadpoles and the ballet of fireflies, Kya burrowed deeper into the wordless wilderness. Nature seemed the only stone that would not slip midstream” (Owens 215). Kya has been abandoned multiple times and feels as if the only one that would stay and understand the way she feels as a whole is nature. Another symbol presented in the novel is Sunday Justice. Sunday Justice is a cat that appears in her jail cell while she is in jail waiting for court. Sunday Justice represents the support and steadiness of nature by showing up when Kya needed something that was nature related the most, while in jail. Sunday Justice appears when Kya thinks about how much she misses the marsh and the gulls. The cat is always there for her while

Kya forms a quick and intense bond with the cat. Isolated from human contact, and harder for her, from nature, the courthouse cat is her only comfort. With Sunday Justice, in touch with an animal, Kya can finally relax enough to sleep, showing that nature is her only thing that can keep her mind at peace. Kya loves nature so much so that any part of nature had made her feel less lonely, “Kya never had her troop of close friends, nor the connections Jodie described, for she never had her own family. She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would” (Owens 363). By always being alone and surrounded by nature her origins are unusual and different from everyone else, which then affects how she behaves differently from others. One more example of the symbolism used in the novel is the fire tower. The fire tower represents how humans attempt to dominate nature. The fire tower is a man-made landmark inside the marsh and is also the setting of two fateful as