How Does Atticus Mature In To Kill A Mockingbird

In Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout recounts her childhood experiences growing up the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression. Scout lives with her widowed father, Atticus, a successful lawyer, and her older brother, Jem. Throughout the course of the novel, the characters matures and grow in different ways, primarily when Atticus takes the high profile case of defending Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white women. While this case causes numerous dilemmas for Jem and Scout, he is overall an admirable father.

Unquestionably, Atticus is an admirable father because many of his actions in To Kill a Mockingbird, show that he is protective of his children. For example, “ It was the coldest

Atticus teaches Scout to think about things in other people's perspectives after her first day of school. "First of all,” he said, "if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-" ... "-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (22). When Jem and Scout recieved air rifles, Atticus tells them they can kill any birds they want, but never kill a mockingbird as it is a sin. “Your father’s right. 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 is a sin to kill a mockingbird.”[Maudie to Scout](74-75). This can be seen as symbolic, that mockingbirds actually represents innocence. This means that to never kill a mockingbird means to never destroy or take advantage of people who are innocent and weaker than you. At the end of the novel, when Bob Ewell is killed by Boo Radley after he attacks Jem and Scout, Atticus wants to say that Jem killed Bob Ewell in self defense to clear his name. The Sheriff, Heck Tate, refuses and says that their story will be that Bob tripped and fell on his own knife, killing himself in the process. The reason the Sheriff says this is because if people know that Boo Radley killed Bob Ewell, he would be treated like a hero, which would be devastating for a recluse like Boo. Atticus does not want to do this because he believes that his children will lose respect for him. “If this thing’s hushed up it’ll be a simple denial to Jem of the way I’ve tried to raise him… if I connived at something like this, frankly I couldn’t meet his eyes…”(232). Scout then reassures Atticus, saying “Well, it’d be sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?”(234). This show that Scout has absorbed the lesson about