How Themes Affect the Characters in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

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“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a novel by Harper Lee in which she describes life of a small community in a tiny Southern town around the time of the Great Depression. This novel highlights the many problems and good things about society in that time period, and these characteristics are shown through the actions of the characters of this community that Lee has made. There are themes that can be made to represent these ideas, and three major ones that are notable and exemplary would be racism, innocence, and bravery. These themes are noteworthy because they greatly affect characters in the novel and there are many things that are brought to light about ideas revolving around them. At times, what seems to be one thing related to a theme might change through a character’s actions, which might change the meaning of that theme from the reader’s perspective. Essentially, these three themes can tell much of what goes on, why it goes on, and how. Racism is something that has always plagued the South, and the small county of Maycomb that Lee has created is no different. One of the major forms of racism that is revealed during the course of events in the novel is when a young black man named Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white girl on account of the girl’s father, in other words this is an example of whites vs. blacks in law. Tom Robinson was disadvantaged in the case, even though in his testimony, he said how Mayella “says she never kisses a grown man before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger” (260). Even so, Tom just “breaks into a blind raving charge at the fence and starts climbing over” (315). This is when he is jailed for his supposed “crime”, and the prison guards end up shooting him to death, with precisely “seventeen bullet hol... ... middle of paper ... ...hat he “...feels right sorry for her, she seems to try more’n the rest of ‘em…”(264). These were genuine remarks that he made, with another example being how he answered “yes” when asked (in terms of doing work for Mayella) if he “...did all this chopping and work from sheer goodness…”(263). According to his testimony, Tom Robinson was an innocent and kind-hearted man who simply wanted to help a lonely and helpless girl out. Regardless, he suffers with death. With this, another Mockingbird is figuratively killed. Tom went from being a loner and kind person to some “disgusting rapist” who pretends to be a good person. Atticus’ being a Mockingbird is very tied to the predicament of Tom Robinson. Atticus has a personal belief that the reason he is defending Robinson is that “...if I don’t hold up my head in town, I can’t represent this county in the legislature” (100).

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