Yet at the same time you almost might use the word loose instead of caught. Although they are two opposite words.

In Part Two, Chapter 2, F. Jasmine responds to Berenice's remarks during dinner that people are all "caught," by the fact that they were born one way or another. From Berenice's perspective, this means to be caught a black person in a world that discriminates against minorities. Berenice says this to express understanding for F. Jasmine's ruminations over the notion of being sectored away from other people, trapped in a cell that cannot bind with any of the other floating particles in the world. So F. Jasmine points out a kind of dichotomy in the situation Berenice has articulated. She says that people may be caught, but they are loose as well. They are loose from each other, and they are, at the same time, caught in a system that creates this looseness.

The overwhelming feeling of disconnectedness serves as a challenge to F. Jasmine to break the rules of society and to live by her own laws. But it also makes a larger social statement about the state of racist discrimination in the 1940s American south. McCullers uses the novella as a pulpit here to take a stand against a world in which old societal rules are so engrained that they are stifling and harmful. It puts F. Jasmine's plight to mature on the same plain as society's need to mature beyond petty discrimination. It makes F. Jasmine's struggle ageless. Because in the same way that she is trying to connect with other people, to break down boundaries, so is Berenice wishing to end the division between black and white and to find a husband to love in the way she once loved Ludie.

Previous section Important Quotes Explained Page 4

Popular pages: The Member of the Wedding

Take a Study Break