The Things She's Seen

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Catching”

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Sunset”

Isobel Catching, the story’s second narrator, begins telling Michael what she knows about the fire and the murder. In verse, she recalls the night that she and her mother stood watching a sunset. At the time, she wore the green sweater that her mother had made for her. They were on a road trip to give Catching some time away from the “unfair” and “mean” people in their home community. Catching’s mother also taught Catching about the strength of the women in her maternal line and instructed her to recite their names in her mind in order to control her own anger. She emphasized that the strength of these maternal ancestors was an important part of Catching’s inheritance.

An unexpected storm sent them fleeing for the car, but they could not drive fast enough to avoid a flash flood. In the darkness and chaos, Catching’s mother crashed the car in the river. When Catching regained consciousness, the water was up to her chest, and her mother was trying to free her from the car. Just before the water rose above Catching’s head, she saw her mother say one last word but could not understand what it was. Her mother managed to release Catching’s seatbelt, and Catching was swept away into the current. As she tumbled around under the water, she recalled her mother’s story about her Nanna Sadie’s escape from the government agents who were trying to take her away on a ship and put her in a government home. Nanna Sadie jumped from the ship and swam all the way home. Inspired by her ancestor’s strength, Catching kicked hard and finally broke the surface, gasping for breath. Using a tree root as a handhold, she hoisted herself onto the riverbank, only to discover her mother’s lifeless body.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Other-Place”

Catching sobbed and screamed for a long time, then finally went silent, fell to the ground, and passed out. When she awoke, the world looked strange to her. She saw two suns, and the trees were leafless. Everything looked gray and washed-out. Her mother’s body had disappeared, and she thought that she herself had been transported “[s]omewhere different. Somewhere else” (35). She did not feel frightened, because after her mother death, nothing mattered to her. She understood, finally, the single final word that her mother had said to her: “Live” (35). Although tempted to let herself fade away to nothingness, Catching felt a responsibility to honor her mother’s final wish, so she drank from a stream, fashioned a spear, and began trying to catch a fish.

In the distance, she saw strange creatures that shimmered as if made of water. They were heavily muscled, had four legs and a tail, and jaws full of gleaming teeth. The creatures charged, chasing Catching through the forest of sticks and toward a sheer cliff face, where she began to climb. Finally, she ran out of handholds. Seeing a small ledge, she jumped for it and just managed to grab hold of its edge with one hand. She screamed in pain as her hand broke, then finally managed to pull herself up, realizing that she truly wanted to live.

Suddenly, two gray, winged figures flew down to the ledge, their faces covered with white masks. Although their features were human, Catching thought they could not be real humans because there was a “wrongness” about them that made “the hairs on the back of [her] neck prickle” (41). They told her that they were “Fetchers” and began admiring Catching’s colors, which were so out of place in this gray, colorless world. They called her a little rainbow and were delighted to realize that she was alone. When they realized that she was injured, they agreed to heal her, and they also planned to give her to someone they referred to only as “him.”

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “The Beneath”

The Fetchers flew with Catching to a spot in the forest where there was a tree across from a boulder shaped like an egg. They carried her beneath the ground to a tunnel. One of the Fetchers, called “First,” told the other, “Second,” to attend to Catching’s injuries while he told their master that they had captured her. Catching could see no way out of her situation, so she let Second drag her through a door. She planned to wait and watch for an opportunity to escape.

The room was lined with shelves containing cubes of a clear, jelly-like substance. Catching remembered her mother telling her that knowledge can be used as a weapon. She asked Second to explain their surroundings, and he told her that this place was where he and First brought “the colors” for “him” (47). She could get no more useful information from Second, who smeared the jelly-like substance onto Catching’s wounds, healing them instantly and anesthetizing her. Second hauled a sleepy Catching to another room and tossed her onto a bed, leaving her there. She tried to stay awake, but sleep overtook her.

Part 2 Analysis

Although Beth’s words adopt the conventional fact-finding rhythm of the typical detective story, Catching’s otherworldly narrative is told in verse, an approach that emphasizes the increasing sense of unreality that she encounters. Although the novel-in-verse is becoming a common form used in young-adult and children’s literature, it has a unique function within this particular story, for it evokes the Aboriginal tradition of song-poetry, which is used to transmit important cultural information. Her story uses line breaks and various other poetic conventions, and her descriptions employ lavish similes and metaphors to convey a kaleidoscope of emotion. The level of realism in her story shift dramatically, reflecting Catching’s emotions at the time the events took place and creating an almost mythic tone as the more fantastical elements of her experience are revealed.

Catching’s story begins realistically as she describes the trip with her mother, and her tone is light as she jokes that “Mom’s knitting is as bad as her hair dye” (27). However, her tone shifts as she touches upon the purpose of their trip, and her syntax becomes choppier and more fragmented when she relates her anger over the injustices that she has experienced at the hands of unspecified “mean” and “unfair” people. Although she does not explain the nature of this mean-spirited behavior, her references to the frequent racial discrimination and oppression that her ancestors have experienced imply that she is reacting to The Impact of Colonialism in Australia.

Significantly, the storm and the flood create a chaotic and almost liminal space that marks Catching’s passage from ordinary reality to the “other-place” that harbors such fantastical creatures. The novel’s syntax reflects this shift, for once the storm and the flood begin, Catching’s descriptions become even more fragmented, and when she wakes again after grieving her mother’s death, her narrative takes on distinctly surreal elements . Details like the grayness of the landscape and the two inexplicable suns establish that she is now in a different world where unusual occurrences are possible. The title of this chapter, “The Other-Place,” ties Catching’s experience to Aunty June’s comment in Chapter 2 that Beth is “on another side” (18) after her death. The use of italics when Catching describes her surroundings as “[s]omeplace else” (37) stresses how alien this place really is to her. Strategic line breaks are also used to isolate words like “empty” and “weak,” stressing how hollow Catching feels in a world without her mother. The sheer absence of color also signifies that she is now trapped in a world that is entirely without hope.

Although Catching herself does not hold this view, the fantastical details of her experience can also be interpreted as skewed perceptions resulting from her head injury. These two potential explanations—that she has really been transported to another world and that she is still in the everyday world but has been addled by a head injury—are best viewed as simultaneously true. Later revelations will ground Catching’s tale firmly in the real world, but even so, the supernatural qualities of Catching’s captivity and Beth’s after-death experiences imply that there is indeed an “other-place” that exists alongside known reality.

As Catching begins to recount her encounter with the “Fetchers,” the tone of her narrative emphasizes the ominously inhuman nature of her captors, who have leathery gray wings and masked but human facial features. Likewise, their dialogue is repetitive, cryptic, and empty of compassion, and even their methods of healing Catching’s wounds are designed to be bizarre and threatening. The details in this particular scene strongly suggest that in the “real” world, Catching is actually being drugged. Although Catching’s surreal account of “The Other-Place” does not strictly describe ordinary reality, it does precisely describe Catching’s personal and emotional experience. Ultimately, her story is meant to be interpreted allegorically, for the fantastical elements of her tale displace the ugly realities of her real-world abduction and the sexual assaults to which she will soon be subjected, replacing her all-too-human tormentors with the fantasy figures of the Fetchers and their soon-to-be-introduced accomplices, the Feeds.