To Kill A Mockingbird: Childhood Experience

To Kill A Mockingbird: Childhood Experience

Have you ever thought of an answer to reply to your children, when they ask you, “What was the world like when you were a child?”, “What things that happened that impressed you most when you were a child?” or “How interesting is your childhood experience?”. Everybody must have had their childhood. Some of the experiences may cause them to smile, or even laugh, while some of them may bring back bitter memories. It is always hard to express the childhood incidents or experience in a clear and interesting way, since they were past memories that happened long time ago. Moreover, when a person has grown up, they will never have the same feeling which they might have in their childhood.

However, the authors Harper Lee and Mark Twain can express their own childhood inside the stories they created, in a lively and realistic way. The two novels

To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer have a very similar characteristic. It is the way they describe a person's childhood experience, and their feelings and new knowledge that come out from those experiences. This characteristic, however, has given me a big revelation after reading the two novels. The novels show that the childhood experience of a person has a great positive influence on his personality, behaviour, and ways on dealing with others. This idea has been shown by the authors in both novels.

From the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, one could discover that innocent behaviour and misunderstanding can lead a child to view a person or thing incorrectly and incompletely. This behaviour can also lead a child to a wrong perspective. In the first part of To Kill a Mockingbird, the main characters

Scout, Jem, and Dill thought that the Radley family and their member, Boo Radley, as strange and unnatural human beings. They described Radley's house as “That is a sad house....” (Harper Lee, 48). This is a “fact” they heard from their neighbours. Until one day, their neighbour Miss Maudie's house was found on fire. While Scout was standing outside in the cold watching the fire, someone from behind her and put a blanket around her shoulders. Later, Scout and Jem realized that there was only one person in town who had not fought to put out the fire -- Boo Radley. Scout asked, “Thank who?”(Harper Lee, 76). Jem replied,

“Boo Radley. You were so busy looking at the fire you didn't know it when he put the blanket around you.”(Harper Lee, 76) It was then that Scout and Jem started