Gabriel Octavio

Ms. Woelke

Pre-AP Language Arts

April 23, 2020

The first chapter of Harper Lee’s ​To Kill a Mockingbird ​involves Jem, a protagonist in

the story, to describe Boo Radley to his friends Scout and Dill. Through Lee’s use of figurative

and symbolic language, Jem paints a grotesque and animalistic figure of Boo Radley to the

reader. In the excerpt, Jem infers from Radley’s tracks that “he dined on raw squirrels and any

cats he could catch,” and reasons that his hands are always bloodstained because “if you ate an

animal raw, you could never wash the blood off” (Lee 13). In essence, Jem describes Radley as a

ravenous creature that indiscriminately eats any sort of animal in their way. The hyperbolic line

about consuming raw animals also paints Radley as an animalistic person. The forever-staining

blood may be a symbol of the disrespect to the innocent animals Radley killed and proceeded to

consume without proper preparation, marking him as immoral or without bounds. Jem continues,

iterating that Radley is “six-and-a-half feet tall,” whose “eyes popped” and mouth “drooled most

of the time” (Lee 13). Jem describes the physical features of Radley, using descriptive language

to paint a towering and grotesque figure. Words like “popped” and “drooled” paint Radley as

hideous and unsanitary. The lengthening of the term “six-and-a-half feet” accentuates the height

of Radley as the reader digests Radley’s lofty height. Overall, Harper Lee’s usage of vivid

imagery and symbolic language ultimately are the devices Lee uses to portray Boo Radley as an

animalistic and deformed character in ​To Kill a Mockingbird.​