The book To Kill a Mockingbird tackles many important topics. There are many messages someone can get from this book, and everyone’s interpretation of the story will be different. However, in the novel there are many notable events that build out a common theme that ties all the other messages in the story together. The main theme in To Kill A Mockingbird is to stop judging others based on preconceived notions. The first few chapters of the book follow Jem, Scout, and Dill as they spend their summer together. Apart from playing normal children's games during the summer, the kids also play a game surrounding their neighbor. Their neighbor, Boo Radley, is a man who doesn’t live too far away from them, but he is unlike their other neighbors due to the fact he never leaves his house. …show more content…
IN their game they acted out these legends, “It was a melancholy little drama, woven from bits and scraps of gossip and neighborhood legend: Mrs. Radley had been beautiful until she married Mr. Radley.”(Lee 44). The children continue to play this game until they get caught by Jem’s and Scout’s father, Atticus, who has repeatedly told them to stop pestering the Radley’s. Over time, the kids fascination with the Radleys diminishes as they grow up. One night the Radley’s come into their life again, this time instead of as a joke or game, it's as the people who save their lives, “Before he went inside the house, he stopped in front of Boo Radley. ‘Thank you for my children,’ he said” (Lee 317). Boo Radley, the man the kids had been fearing and making games off, stopped Bob Ewell from killing them. The kids who had only heard gossip about Boo and the Radleys came to the preconceived notion that they were scary or evil, but in the end they were the people who saved their lives. Tom Robinson is another person that has been chastised in
The book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is about a black man named Tom Robinson who is being charged with the rape of a white girl named Mayella Ewell. While the lawyers are giving their closing statements, Atticus Finch, the lawyer for Tom Robinson, makes his closing statement using ethos and logos persuasive methods to show that Bob Ewell and Mayella Ewell were lying. The logo is the principle of reason and judgment. Ethos is appealing to somebody's emotions. These persuasion methods were effective because Atticus uses this technique a lot one example of this is when he uses logos and asks Bob Ewell to put his signature on a piece so that he could see what Bob Ewell's dominant hand was because according to heck Tate her right side
Scout Finch and her brother Jem live with their widowed father Atticus in the town of Maycomb, Alabama. The book takes place in a society withstanding effects of the Great Depression. The two main characters, Scout and Jem, approach life with a childlike view engulfed in innocence. They befriend a young boy named Dill, and they all become intrigued with the spooky house they refer to as “The Radley Place”. The owner, Nathan Radley (referred to as Boo), has lived there for years without ever venturing outside its walls. The children laugh and imagine the reclusive life of Boo Radley, yet their father quickly puts a halt to their shenanigans, as they should not judge the man before they truly know him. Atticus unforgettably tells the children, “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.”
In Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird, most of the younger characters show growth throughout the book and Scout Finch showed the most growth in becoming mature. If it weren’t for her family, acquaintances, and people she saw regularly every day, her personality and growth would have been extremely different. The people that lived in the town of Maycomb had the biggest impact on how Scout grew up and became the person she was.
Black and white, right and wrong; do decisions that simple and clear even exist? Does a decision ever mean gaining everything without giving anything up? Many characters in To Kill A Mockingbird are forced to make difficult, heart wrenching decisions that have no clear right answer. Harper Lee presents many of these important decisions in To Kill A Mockingbird as ethical dilemmas, or situations that require a choice between two difficult alternatives. Both of these alternatives have unpleasant aspects and question morals and ethics. A person is put in an awkward position, with their mind saying contradicting things. These dilemmas are presented in many different ways. The decisions in the beginning of the book are simple and can be solved quite easily, yet they are symbolic of later decisions. Other dilemmas place adult-like decisions in the lap of a child. One dilemma concerned a man burdened with the strict traditions of the South. Then there are the two biggest dilemmas, Atticus' decision to take the case and Heck Tate's choice between truth and the emotional well being of a man. Lee's ingenious storyline is established by these crucial and mentally arduous choices faced by the characters.
While the second part is about the trial of Tom Robinson. In the first part of the novel, Scout along with her brother Jem and her friend Dill investigate the mysterious life of their neighbor, Boo Radley. Boo has not left Boo Radley is the next door neighbor of the Finch’s. He is an outsider of the community, because he does not leave the house. He got in some trouble as a teenager, so his father locked him up inside the house.
Scout starts to understand people’s needs, opinions, and their points of view. In the beginning, Scout does not really think much about other people’s feelings, unless it directly pertains to her. Jem and Dill decided to create a play based on the life of one of their neighbors, Boo Radley. According to neighborhood rumors, Boo got into a lot of trouble as a kid, stabbed his father with scissors, and never comes out of the house. The children create a whole drama and act it out each day. “As the summer progressed, so did our game. We polished and perfected it, added dialogue and plot until we had manufactured a small play among which we rang changes every day” (Lee 52). Scout turned Boo’s life into a joke, something for her entertainment. She did not think about how Boo would feel if he knew what they were doing. Near the end of the book, while Boo was at the Finch house, Scout led him onto the porc...
As children we are oblivious to the influence of those who surround us . We chose to see the greater good in humanity rather than the obvious truth. We are influenced by our environment and choose to abide to the morals presented to us. This applies directly to the novel to Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which moves along with the lives of two young children ;Scout and Jem. Along with the obstacles they face and the exposure they have to the ideas of racism, gender roles, and degenerate morals. Throughout the novel it is evident that Scout and Jem go from naïveté to maturity due to their surroundings, influence of family members, and the arising controversy of the Tom Robinson case. They both develop
“Learn to deal with the fact that not everyone is perfect, but everyone deserves respect, honesty, justice and equality, I’m for truth no matter who tells it, I’m for justice no matter who it is for or against” (anonymous)
Has evil always been around, or did man create it? One could trace evil all the way back to Adam and Eve; however, evil came to them, but it was not in them. When did evil become part of a person? No one knows, but evil has been around for a long time and unfortunately is discovered by everyone. In many great classics in literature evil is at the heart or the theme of the novel, including Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This classic book demonstrates the growing up of two children in the South and illustrates the theme of evil by showing how they discover, how they deal, and how they reconcile themselves to the evils they experience.
The Radley family has a presence that startles nearly all of Maycomb County in some way. For example, every resident of Maycomb County would never set foot in even the Radley house yard. However, this was not the case for protagonist Scout Finch and her brother Jem. This show of bravery represents outstanding courage. Moreover, the main area of fear of the Radley family is provided by Boo. Boo is the child of the family, and is rumored to eat grotesque foods such as live rats. Although very few people had ever seen Boo, nobody dared to search for him. That is, except for Scout and Jem. Despite being terrified of what Boo could be, Jem and Scout searched tirelessly for him. Even after their father forbid them to search for Boo, Jem and Scout would not be denied and searched for him anyways. The courage shown by the young children in this novel is good.
During our lives, we develop morals and values through life experiences. They can be influenced by our society and the people we surround ourselves with. In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee demonstrates courage, social inequality and prejudice through the characters and events in the book. We experience life lessons through the protagonist Scout Finch as she develops her own values. This is displayed through a variety of life lessons and values throughout the novel.
A byproduct of a working society are the generally accepted ways in which one is supposed to act. These societal norms tend to put pressure on the populace to act in such a way that is socially accepted as to escape the ire of the public eye. And the voice of the public has the power to suppress those who cut across the grain, if they are not strong enough to withstand it, demonstrated by the book To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Lee’s novel explores the idea that societal norms attempt to suppress people who go against them through the characters Dolphus Raymond and Atticus Finch. In To Kill A Mockingbird, it is shown that societal norms try to suppress the ones who go against them through Dolphus Raymond.
The first theme is the coexistence of good and evil throughout the story. The way the book shows the moral nature of people, essentially their good and bad sides. The book further promotes this theme by using the transformation of Scout and Jem view of childhood innocence, in which they believe that everybody is good, because they have never been exposed to evil, to a more adult view, in which they have been exposed to many types of evil and have to apply it to their thinking. An important subtheme of this book involves the danger that, hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to many innocent people. The people in the book affected by this are Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. These two are unprepared for the evil they were exposed and as a result they were mentally destroyed. Jem is also experiences the same affect when he discovers the evil of racism, in which his faith in justice and humanity is lost. However, Scout retains her faith in justice and humanity, because the case had no effect on her. In this book, the voice of morality is Atticus Finch, who already experiences and understands evil, but does not lose faith in humanity’s capacity to be good. He understands that everybody basically has both good and bad qualities, but it is more important to appreciate the good ones. The view of the world is the ...
To Kill a Mockingbird “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it” (Lee 30). Atticus Finch teaches his children to look at life and people in a different way, and he also practices what he preaches to his children. By focusing on the coexistence of good and evil, the importance of moral education, and the existence of social inequality, one could argue to prove these points and how they form the themes of Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird. Throughout the novel, readers see the good and the evil come out of most people.
To Kill a Mockingbird portrays life and the role of racism in the 1930’s. A reader may not interpret several aspects in and of the book through just the plain text. Boo Radley, Atticus, and the title represent three such things. Not really disclosed to the reader until the end of the book, Arthur "Boo" Radley plays an important role in the development of both Scout and Jem.