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MERHAN, Marwin T.

HUMA101/E-4

08/13/2018

To Kill A Mockingbird

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a story wrote by Harper Lee, one of the most prominent

authors of her age. The story is set in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama; the 1930s,

according to the book Maycomb was an old and boring peaceful town, but it is not

without a problem, racial division is a problem, ne'er do wells living in the slums like the

Ewell family who’s known for being the lowest of the low amongst the white people in

Maycomb, they’re extremely poor and uneducated. Living at Maycomb does not sound as

fun as living in a big city but, it has the advantage of being simple and peaceful. The

novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published in 1960 and was met with success winning

the Pulitzer Prize.

The story is told from the perspective of an innocent little girl, named Scout Jean

Louise Finch, at the beginning of the novel Scout is a good-hearted five-year-old-child

who has no experience with the evils of the world. The story is narrated in a first person

perspective and began when Scout was only five-years-old and ended when she was

around eight-years-old. The first lines of the first chapter starts with “WHEN HE WAS

NEARLY thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” followed by

the first lines of the second paragraph of the first chapter “When enough years had gone

by to enable us to look back on them,”, this makes it crystal clear that Scout is narrating

these events from a time much later than the time from which these events are happening.

Throughout the story, Scout gives details about the events that’s happened from her
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perspective as a child and the way she understood them at the time. The first chapters

shows how innocent she is but, as the story progresses, Scout will have her first

encounter with evil through the form of racial prejudice which gives me the idea that the

novel is about the loss of innocence and why its wrong to prejudice at people.

With the story being set in a southern state, racism cannot be avoided due to the

history of slavery. A white man will always triumph in the eyes of the society and the so

called justice at the time against a black man. When Tom Robinson has been falsely

accused of rape, the people believed that he was guilty, even when Scout’s father Atticus

Finch, a lawyer and a white man has stood up for him and proved his innocence. The

poor Tom Robinson is still convicted for rape and was sentenced to death despite being

proved innocent, just because he had a different color of skin.

The author, Harper Lee, wrote a lot about morals through Atticus Finch whom

according to Russel Ransom, is “largely based on Harper Lee’s Father, Amasa Coleman

Lee, an attorney who was a champion of civil rights and an advocate of racial equality”.

Atticus Finch discusses topics of racism and prejudice.

To prove my thesis that the theme of the novel is about the loss of innocence and

not to prejudice at people, the first evidence I have is told in the story of Boo Radley, a

person with such an enigmatic figure, he had lost his innocence through the cruelty of his

father whose name was never mentioned and has only been referred to as “Mr. Radley”.

Boo Radley never stepped outside of his house because according to the neighborhood

legend, in his younger years he was charged with disorderly conduct, disturbing the

peace, assault and battery etc. and his father arranged a deal with the judge for him to be
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free and the cost is that Boo will not cause any more trouble, and from that day on he was

never seen again for fifteen years. Due to his long disappearance, kids made up a stories

about him and gave him the name The Gray Ghost. But as the story ends he makes an

appearance and saves Scout and his brother Jem from Bob Ewell, which proves them

wrong about their opinion about him being evil. The second proof is the case that

happened with Tom Robinson who was wrongfully convicted for rape despite the fact

that his innocence was proved. And for my last evidence, the mockingbird is a sign of

innocence and the title “To Kill a Mockingbird” could be interpreted in many ways, it

could be a metaphorical way to say, to lose innocence, or to literally kill an innocent (the

case of Tom Robinson), or it could also be about how Boo Radley refused to take credits

for saving Scout and Jem Finch from Bob Ewell, because the way he lives fame will

actually kill the mockingbird.

As innocent and naive the way the story is told, it is still undeniably dark, with

themes suggesting extreme violence, incest, false justice, and racism.