How Does Harper Lee Use Humor In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, and her parents were Frances Lee and Amasa Coleman (Byers 220).Writing was interesting to Harper Lee when she was just seven years old (Mancini 10). Lee became so interested in writing that she started developing stories of her own (O’Neill 16). She was the youngest of out all four children (13). Nelle was related to Robert E. Lee who was the civil war commander in the Confederate Army (Byers 220). “A neighbor of the family, Marie Rudisill, described him as ‘a tall, angular man, detached, not particularly friendly, especially with children…. He was not the sort of father who came up to his children, ruffled their hair, and made jokes for their amusement.’” (O’Neill 13). Most children were …show more content…
Dave suggests To Kill a Mockingbird would not have been a work of art without tragic elements (Bloom 56). Harper Lee is able to involve pathos and humor uniquely together. Comedy and tragedy are like Ying and Yang in this story and both of them starts to flow in the final analysis. The pattern of the literary technique includes a competition between good and evil. For example, “Atticus in his failure to defend the Negro victim, eventually hunted down while scaling the wall in quest of freedom, the innocent victim, and Arthur Boo, who is endowed with tender human emotions and compassion, but is nearly buried alive in the Radley House, which is a veritable sepulcher, simple because his father loved to wallow in the vanity fair, and the suffering Finch children, they all intensify the sense of waste involved in the eternal conflict” (Bloom 57). Harper Lee ensured her novel had literary excellence and with that being stated she guaranteed her place in American literature (“Plot …show more content…
Scout’s tom boyishness is depicted in the beginning of the novel and draws attention to how her feminist attributes add on. Sometimes people may force Atticus to see the “bigger picture” of the traditional southern women stereotypes. Scout does not agree with the idea of Alexandria trying to turn her into a traditional Southern woman (73). “Since the mother of Scout and Jem is dead, Atticus has assumed the full responsibility of playing mother and father whenever possible – though admittedly he employs Calpurnia and allows Alexandria to move in with them to give the children, particularly Scout, a female role model” (Bloom

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