Good People Do Bad Things

Good vs. Evil is often seen by many people as the backbone to conflicts and debates throughout history and the present. Many also often assume that one side of a conflict is right and good, and the other wrong and evil. But in reality, good and evil more often than not coexist in the same thing. Children, though, many times cannot see this, and take something as fully right and good or fully wrong and evil. This is shown in the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In the book, the main character, Scout, is a young girl growing up in the post-civil war South with her older brother, Jim, and her father, Atticus. Throughout the story as Scout grows up, she encounters many people and events that make her question her knowledge of what is right and wrong. Through characterization, diction, and point of view, Harper Lee illustrates to readers just how good and evil coexist everyday inside all people.

To begin, one of the ways Harper Lee shows this to readers is through characterization. A good example of this is Mrs. Dubose, Scout’s neighbor. Mrs. Dubose is an old, racist, woman who always insults Atticus, a lawyer, for defending a black man in court. After getting mad of how Mrs. Dubose can be so evil towards Atticus, Jim rips up her treasured flower bed. As a punishment, Mrs. Dubose wants Jim to come down and read to her every day for a few weeks. When Jim reads to her though, after a while she begins to shake, then Jim and Scout are sent out of the house. After finishing reading to her, a few months later Mrs. Dubose dies. It turns out Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict, and Jim’s reading was helping her get over her addiction. Atticus then tells Jim that she “had real courage.” Jim cannot understand this, because she was such a...

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...il can be inside the same person. Because Harper Lee writes using a first person view, events and the character’s thoughts are more personal to the reader, and this helps when Harper Lee uses this writing element as a way to show the coexistence of good and evil.

Overall, Harper Lee uses the elements of characterization, diction, and point of view to illustrate to readers how good and evil can coexist inside a person. She puts this theme in To Kill a Mockingbird as a message to readers about how good people can do bad things, and how good and evil are both part of the human condition and part of being a person. Even though this is true, she also uses this as a message to readers indirectly telling them to use the good inside themselves, like Atticus or Scout, and help others when they need help.

Works Cited

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird