Boo Radley Maturity

The novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is about a young girl, Scout, her brother, Jem, and their friend, Dill living in Maycomb County during the early 1930s. The three children hear stories about their neighbor, Arthur “Boo” Radley, and decide they want to try to get him out of his house. A few unsuccessful summers later, Scout’s father, Atticus, is a lawyer that has been assigned a colored man’s case. The man, Tom Robinson, was accused of raping a white woman. As the children know this isn’t true, they don’t understand why he was found guilty. Slowly, though, they begin to understand more about the people around them. One of the many themes in this novel is with maturity comes an understanding of the world’s issues and complexities. At the beginning of the novel, Scout, Jem, and Dill don’t understand the problems in Maycomb, the town in which they live. They believe everything people tell them, and don’t stop to think …show more content…
Scout begins to realize how the stories about Boo influence the way they would think if they met him. They would believe the stories even more if Boo had to go to court for killing Bob Ewell. Atticus knows Boo would be shown no mercy, so he talks to Scout, saying, “‘Scout,’ he said, ‘Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?’” (370), to which Scout responds, “’Yes, sir… It’d be sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?’” (370). Here, Scout shows she understands how the townspeople would act towards Boo, and she doesn’t want their stories to make their decisions for them. Because of the events that have taken place in this book, Scout is beginning to understand how the world works, even at the young age she is. She is starting to understand how much racism there is, as well as how the people have told themselves the same stories about Boo so often, they began to believe the fantasies that were once told to scare the