To Kill A Mockingbird Analysis

Love and Life are the Best Teachers
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by a majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
Dalton Hare
To Kill a Mockingbird

The great literary classic, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, is about the ageing and maturing of two children in the old town of Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression. Basing this novel off of her own childhood Lee was able to bring the reader deep into the book with her detailed descriptions and realistic plot. To create a more enjoyable read she took a new and interesting stance for the narration of the story. To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel told through the eyes of an eight year old girl Scout, with voice of an mature women, about lessons she learned in a town where her the boundaries imposed upon ourselves and each other.

Told through eyes that did not match the voice, Harper Lee tells the story with a first person narrative, through a memory, to include important details such as qualities about the town and the behavior of the neighbors while still giving Scout a “no filter” opinion about the topic. She shows that within the first chapter while building the characters. Scout’s impacting opinion, “Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence” (p. 7). This shows the contrast between the child’s eyes and the woman’s voice telling the story. A child that has no memories of her mother would not see the importance of this absence especially when she has Calpurnia as a surrogate mother watching out for her. The adult woman telling the story knows of the importance of the family situation when she is recalling the memory. Further more, the entire first part of the book would seem irrelevant if being told by child Scout. The older voice knew that for the bo...

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...ating themes. The difference between justice, fairness and righteousness seen in the social ladder and in court to combat the prejudices to black citizens but the novel told the struggle a small family faced breaking those prejudices. “You’ll see white men cheat black men everyday in your life. but...no matter who he is...or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash” and through Atticus we can see the societal rift he is overstepping. These boundaries, placed by yourself and your social prejudices, are demonstrated in To Kill a Mockingbird through the power of numbers and the necessity of the brave to break them. By using her childhood life as a backdrop and telling the story though a recalling narration, Lee achieved her goal in creating a love story that tells the life long lesson in doing what you feel is right, whether just or fair, to create a better world.