To Kill a Mockingbird has claimed its place among those great books of the American literary canon. It is taught in American schools and remains a persistently bright and contemporary revelation of ethics today. Here is a celebrated story about compassion, irrationality, and race and class relations written by Harper Lee, a writer who grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, and who attended the University of Alabama before venturing off to New York as an aspiring novelist. The story, set in the Deep South around the 1930s, emerged from the vault of Harper Lee’s consciousness in the years leading up to 1960, when the novel was published; it went on to receive critical acclaim and earned Harper Lee the coveted Pulitzer Prize and other honors. To Kill
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In spite of its serious tone and search for moral justice, the story conveys humor and regional parlance, and its success lies largely in nine-year-old Scout Finch, the novel’s female protagonist, a tomboy, and the eyes through which we observe Mockingbird’s plot that takes place in Maycomb. While To Kill a Mockingbird dramatizes the nature of its protagonists (Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch), this paper will focus on the portrayal of some of its secondary characters as undeniably unifying, caring, and good in spite of their differing social and personal attributes. Calpurnia, Maudie Atkinson, Mr. Underwood, Dolphus Raymond, Reverend Sykes, and Boo Radley exist as outsiders of the main culture in the novel; as secondary characters, they demonstrate aspects of humanness that underpin the actions of the protagonists and raise the novel to a special level. At the onset and in the very first paragraph, Scout Finch leads us in her adult voice (a firstperson viewpoint) to a stopping point in time—that moment when her brother Jem breaks his left arm when he is nearly …show more content…
There is nothing irregular or inessential in Mockingbird’s plot; the narrative is straight to the point. It has, however, a wonderfully Southern poetic movement that is light and airy, as if the novel were bestowed with a sense of permanent summer. The words are crisp with regional humor, and the Copyright 2012 Ignatius V Aloysius | Evanston, Illinois USA | www.trueideas.net | ignatiusaloysius.com storytelling is unembellished and spared of excessive rambling, as it measures forward, step by step and page by page, like when Atticus goes to and from work, like the Finch children and Dill when they go tiptoeing up to the Radley’s front porch, like Calpurnia when she sets the table then clears it. From the very beginning we learn of Calpurnia’s unheralded but grounded presence in the Finch home, although young Scout would be more inclined to think of Cal as an adversary. And yet Calpurnia clearly needs to do what is right when Atticus is away at work in his office inside the Maycomb Bank building; she cooks and clothes Jem and Scout, she keeps a close eye on them when they play outside, and she even scolds them as any parent would.
In spite of its serious tone and search for moral justice, the story conveys humor and regional parlance, and its success lies largely in nine-year-old Scout Finch, the novel’s female protagonist, a tomboy, and the eyes through which we observe Mockingbird’s plot that takes place in Maycomb. While To Kill a Mockingbird dramatizes the nature of its protagonists (Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch), this paper will focus on the portrayal of some of its secondary characters as undeniably unifying, caring, and good in spite of their differing social and personal attributes. Calpurnia, Maudie Atkinson, Mr. Underwood, Dolphus Raymond, Reverend Sykes, and Boo Radley exist as outsiders of the main culture in the novel; as secondary characters, they demonstrate aspects of humanness that underpin the actions of the protagonists and raise the novel to a special level. At the onset and in the very first paragraph, Scout Finch leads us in her adult voice (a firstperson viewpoint) to a stopping point in time—that moment when her brother Jem breaks his left arm when he is nearly …show more content…
There is nothing irregular or inessential in Mockingbird’s plot; the narrative is straight to the point. It has, however, a wonderfully Southern poetic movement that is light and airy, as if the novel were bestowed with a sense of permanent summer. The words are crisp with regional humor, and the Copyright 2012 Ignatius V Aloysius | Evanston, Illinois USA | www.trueideas.net | ignatiusaloysius.com storytelling is unembellished and spared of excessive rambling, as it measures forward, step by step and page by page, like when Atticus goes to and from work, like the Finch children and Dill when they go tiptoeing up to the Radley’s front porch, like Calpurnia when she sets the table then clears it. From the very beginning we learn of Calpurnia’s unheralded but grounded presence in the Finch home, although young Scout would be more inclined to think of Cal as an adversary. And yet Calpurnia clearly needs to do what is right when Atticus is away at work in his office inside the Maycomb Bank building; she cooks and clothes Jem and Scout, she keeps a close eye on them when they play outside, and she even scolds them as any parent would.