Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

During the 1960s, there was a very strict social order system in the Southern United States. This caste system was based on race and social inequality. In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee the main character and narrator is Scout Finch, a naïve but insightful young child. Through the help of her father, Atticus Finch and her brother Jem Finch, she learns about human nature and starts to mature to see the world differently while Lee delivers a brutal and thorough social critique on the existence of social inequality, Innocence and Experience, and the coexistence of good and evil through the eyes of an innocent child.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated completely by Jean Louise “Scout” Finch. As the reader progresses through the book Scout starts from a confused little girl who had just start started school to an assertive person who was aware of the events that happened around her. This is innocence and experience at its best. Scout is a dynamic character that develops as the story progress. In the beginning Scout doesn’t understand some of the things that’s happening or being said around her. For example, “Miss Maudie stopped rocking, and her voice hardened. “You are too young to understand it,” she said, “but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.” I was shocked. “Atticus doesn’t drink whiskey,” I said. “He never drunk a drop in his life—Nome, yes he did. He said he drank some one time and didn’t like it.” (Lee 36). This scene shows Scout’s understanding of life at the time which is perfect to compare to after the trial which had formed a major influence on Scout’s life. After the trial of Tom Robinson that had led to Scout’s exposure to serious things like...

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...rness in the justice system.
Scout Finch learns about human nature while facing difficulties such as social inequalities, the coexistence of good and evil and trying to understand difficult topics such as social injustice and rape as she grows from a naïve child to a more solicitous person. Scout watches as Tom Robinson is disrespected and discriminated against, she also questions how people like Judge Taylor and Bob Ewell could coexist as she matures. This book was written in a child’s point of view because Harper Lee wanted her audience to create their own ideas of what happened not just what the narrator says. To put it briefly Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was written in order to critique the way of life in the Southern United States including their social standards.

Works Cited

Lee, Harper. To kill a mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960. Print.