Crash Themes

Our boy Crash—the main character in Crash—is an extremely intense young dude. His motto is totally "Hulk smash!" On or off the football field, he loves to tackle people. Oh, what's that you say...

Crash is a dude's dude. A bro, even. He's a stereotypical football player who loves to get in fights and mock the weak. He thinks he's God's gift to women, football, and maybe just the world in gen...

Crash seems to have a mixed message when it comes to women and homemaking. On one hand, the book's female characters don't conform to traditional gender roles. Mrs. Coogan is not the cook in her fa...

In Crash, the one thing that Penn and Crash have in common is their dedication to their families. These guys love their parents but, for each of them, their primary support person is someone from t...

Crash is weird in that he's really into stuff like clothes and toys, but at the same time, he doesn't seem to care about that at all. Early in the novel, when Penn won't play with water guns, Crash...

Crash is a novel about the difficulty of communicating with other people. For Scooter, this problem is literal. After his stroke, he can only say one word, and that one word is gibberish. And yet,...

Crash is a love story of sorts, just not a romantic one. Instead, it's a portrait of platonic friendship. Crash has two close friends over the course of the novel. The first is Mike, with whom he h...

Many characters in Crash go through serious upheaval over the course of the novel, while other characters don't change at all. The big transformations happen to Scooter and Crash. Scooter loses a l...