Literary Elements In To Kill A Mockingbird

In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee leaves the reader astonished as she takes them on a journey to the past teaching people life lessons and using her writing to establish an emotional connection to the characters as the different events occur. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published on July 11, 1960. The author Lee Harper uses a variety of literary elements to write a novel that won not only the heart of America but the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction award as well. In the story a young girl, her brother and a new friend that they meet in their early childhood learn unforgettable life lessons. They experience the harsh realities that occurred during that age in time, and they felt as well as started to understand the importance

Even the title of the novel is a symbol that the reader has to think about with careful consideration in order to understand. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” (119) Miss Maudie when asked about her opinion on why it was a sin to kill mockingbirds says that they do not cause any problems to anyone. Actually they do the exact opposite. Their purpose in life is to sing and bring joy and music to the world. “He likened Tom’s death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children, and Maycomb thought he was trying to write an editorial poetical enough to be reprinted in The Montgomery Advertiser.” (323) Mr. Underwood thought of Tom being shot seventeen times as a senseless slaughter. He compares it to the killing of songbirds by hunters and children. It is a symbol comparing Mr. Tom Robinson to a songbird and the Ewell’s and the guards that shot Tom as the hunters and the children. There was no point to killing him, there was no reason to kill him. When the reader thinks about the title and the deeper meaning behind the words to kill a mockingbird, they start to realize there is something more to that. If they are not really thinking about the title, then they start to wonder why the author used that title when the book wasn’t even about birds. When the reader first made a prediction about what the story would be about they said about mockingbirds. In Miss Maudie’s description of why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, the reader gets the idea that mockingbirds are innocent and don’t do anything to hurt anyone. They can start to feel as though this represents the characters in the story that are known as innocent. They don’t see the bad, only the good. Some of