Examples Of Adulthood In To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird: The Trail Leading to Adulthood

To Kill a Mockingbird is not merely a book about the world as it was in the south, during the Great Depression. It is a story about life, and the people living, and what it meant to all of them to be alive. Though it is told through the eyes of a child, you see the characters who are still children begin to mature throughout the story in ways that they may have never really thought possible. “Dill’s eyes flickered at Jem, and Jem looked at the floor” (159). When Dill popped out from under the bed, much to Scout and Jem’s surprise, Jem had a choice to make. On the one hand, Dill was his friend and obviously there was a reason he had been hiding under the bed, and if he were to expose

One that stands out for Scout was when, at the end of the book, Arthur “Boo” Radley comes to the Finch house to visit Jem after he had broken his arm. Scout treats him here like a person, which stands in contrast with the way she’d been talking about him and treating him before this point in the novel. She even calls him by his first name as opposed to the cruel nickname that almost everybody in the town had given to him. She leads him through the house and picks up on his cues, knowing when to let him leave and such. This shows her growth as a person from one that fears and ridicules people who may be different and cut off to a person that treats people who may be different or cut off with respect and dignity. Jem also has his moments where he breaks the code of childhood. The one that pops out in this novel a lot is when Dill is found under the bed after running away from home, and Jem says “You oughta let your mother know where you are” (159),. The earlier-mentioned theme of togetherness comes back into light in this passage, showing that Jem breaks away from the ‘we stick together’ mentality and thinks about the other people in the equation (such as Dill’s mother, who must be worried sick). It’s seen in the book that Jem idolizes his father. He wants to follow him into law, he tries to see the world like him, among other things, and when he goes to tell his father about his and Scout’s findings, he goes and tries to be more of an adult than a child, which is in and of itself breaking