In telling the story of a small Alabama town, To Kill a Mockingbird captures in its pages not only the essence of childhood, but the strengths and weaknesses of mankind, the beauty and goodness, unfairness and cruelty of life.
Our narrator is Scout, a young girl living with her father—Atticus—and older brother in the fictitious town of Maycomb, Alabama. As she grows and changes, so too does her perception of the world. Harper Lee subtly depicts Scout’s development from terror at the ghost stories about her next-door neighbor to a more complex and mature understanding of good and evil, fair and unfair. Gradually, she realizes that not everyone has her point of view, which is “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”1 At the beginning of the story, the “haunt” next door occupies most of Scout’s attention and is the only thing she really fears, but her world starts to shift with the arrival of Dill, an adventure-loving boy staying with his aunt for the summer. The real transformation begins when Atticus, a lawyer, takes on a case—defending a black man accused of raping a white woman—that most of the townsfolk regard as disgraceful. Both of the children learn to be more mature than the townsfolk who taunt them with racist insults. They learn that keeping a cool head and speaking up about a wrong is invaluable, even when it garners more scorn than admiration. Though hitherto in their lives most wrong-doings were fairly dealt with, they find that in the real world not all punishments fit the crime and that justice is often thwarted by the prejudice.
Though To Kill a Mockingbird is in many ways autobiographical, Charles Leerhsen points out in an article in Smithsonian Magazine:
Lee tended to say that her characters were basically fictional, but her biography does seem more ambiguous. After all, she had been a tomboy like Scout, with an older brother like Jem. A Boo Radleyish character lived just down her street. Dill, meanwhile, closely resembled the young Truman Capote, who as a boy had spent summers at his cousin’s house, next door to Lee’s.2
The fact that Lee claims To Kill a Mockingbird is not her autobiography, and yet so many people believe that it must be, shows how true a chord it struck—and continues to strike—in peoples’ minds. She perfectly recreates the character of this small town and of growing up in a time when differences estrange you.
As the story builds to its climax, we watch the illusion of an almost utopian town fall away. While some of the faults we see are trivial and some horrifying, most prominent is the terrible racism that turned friends and neighbors against each other, made one people believe themselves better than another, and made the courtroom, where of all places people should be regarded as equals, into an uneven battle-ground where you sometimes lose your argument before you open your mouth.
If you have not read To Kill a Mockingbird, then you most certainly should, as besides being a very well-written book, it acts as a mirror to the world in both its light and shadow. All in all, Harper Lee shows us in numerous thought-provoking ways why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.
1 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Warner Books: New York , 1960 p. 227.
2 Charles Leerhsen, ”Novel Achievement”, Smithsonian (June 2010) p. 88.
Our narrator is Scout, a young girl living with her father—Atticus—and older brother in the fictitious town of Maycomb, Alabama. As she grows and changes, so too does her perception of the world. Harper Lee subtly depicts Scout’s development from terror at the ghost stories about her next-door neighbor to a more complex and mature understanding of good and evil, fair and unfair. Gradually, she realizes that not everyone has her point of view, which is “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”1 At the beginning of the story, the “haunt” next door occupies most of Scout’s attention and is the only thing she really fears, but her world starts to shift with the arrival of Dill, an adventure-loving boy staying with his aunt for the summer. The real transformation begins when Atticus, a lawyer, takes on a case—defending a black man accused of raping a white woman—that most of the townsfolk regard as disgraceful. Both of the children learn to be more mature than the townsfolk who taunt them with racist insults. They learn that keeping a cool head and speaking up about a wrong is invaluable, even when it garners more scorn than admiration. Though hitherto in their lives most wrong-doings were fairly dealt with, they find that in the real world not all punishments fit the crime and that justice is often thwarted by the prejudice.
Though To Kill a Mockingbird is in many ways autobiographical, Charles Leerhsen points out in an article in Smithsonian Magazine:
Lee tended to say that her characters were basically fictional, but her biography does seem more ambiguous. After all, she had been a tomboy like Scout, with an older brother like Jem. A Boo Radleyish character lived just down her street. Dill, meanwhile, closely resembled the young Truman Capote, who as a boy had spent summers at his cousin’s house, next door to Lee’s.2
The fact that Lee claims To Kill a Mockingbird is not her autobiography, and yet so many people believe that it must be, shows how true a chord it struck—and continues to strike—in peoples’ minds. She perfectly recreates the character of this small town and of growing up in a time when differences estrange you.
As the story builds to its climax, we watch the illusion of an almost utopian town fall away. While some of the faults we see are trivial and some horrifying, most prominent is the terrible racism that turned friends and neighbors against each other, made one people believe themselves better than another, and made the courtroom, where of all places people should be regarded as equals, into an uneven battle-ground where you sometimes lose your argument before you open your mouth.
If you have not read To Kill a Mockingbird, then you most certainly should, as besides being a very well-written book, it acts as a mirror to the world in both its light and shadow. All in all, Harper Lee shows us in numerous thought-provoking ways why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.
1 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Warner Books: New York , 1960 p. 227.
2 Charles Leerhsen, ”Novel Achievement”, Smithsonian (June 2010) p. 88.