To Kill A Mockingbird Setting Analysis

In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, many literary element devices are used to convey one main theme of the novel. One of the main themes in Too Kill a Mockingbird is the sickening disease of Maycomb that swayed people to have the wrong ideas and motives towards blacks in the community and the South as a whole. Lee depicts this theme to the readers through her use of symbolism, setting, and point of view.

Harper Lee uses symbolism to help convey the theme of Too Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel Harper Lee uses many things to represent, or symbolize, characters and major themes.

Harper Lee wrote this story from first person point of view, in Scout’s view. Lee created this character intentionally for Scout to not understand all aspects

of the book. The main concept or theme of To Kill a Mockingbird is racism, and how it is a heinous “disease”. Creating Scout as a little girl growing up and learning, she can also get the right perspective on racism from her father, Atticus. Maycomb and its people are so strung on being prejudice, and the reader can watch as Scout differs from the rest of Maycomb because the people around her (Atticus) are not prejudice like everybody else. This helps re
Setting is used in To Kill a Mockingbird to help justify that racism is a horrific disease of Maycomb.

Lee chooses to set this novel in the 1930’s in Maycomb, Alabama, a small southern town in the south. She could have chose any time period, however, her story would not have turned out the way it did and the theme would not be the same if she did. The setting she created helped develop the theme of racism because racism in the South during the 1930s was a large issue. Setting is so important because if this novel had taken place anywhere else, Tom Robinson’s verdict in the trial may have been different and the whole trial may have not even existed. In the trial against him there was so much evidence that helped his case. However the jury and judge were blinded by his skin color. “There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life.” (Lee 38). "The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box." (Lee 40). He was an innocent man who had done nothing wrong but yet was convicted because of his skin color. Being in the south at such a time as an African American meant being less superior to whites. Harper Lee portrays how a time and place could cause such horrible actions by the blindness of prejudice

people.