Examples Of Compassion In To Kill A Mockingbird

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The Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” However, while this statement may ring true for the innocents, some may argue that monsters of society are undeserving of such compassion. Undeniably, there are such beasts in To Kill a Mockingbird’s Maycomb county – Mayella Ewell is willing to go along with her father’s plan to frame an innocent man for the most medieval of crimes, rape; Boo Radley is gossipped about throughout town and made out to be a heartless man that attacked his hardworking father; Bob Ewell is a racist that is even willing to brutally attack children as a way of getting revenge. However evil these people may appear, only the last of them is undeserving of compassion.
Mayella Ewell went along with her father’s plan of framing an innocent man for rape, making her rather unlikeable from a modern perspective; however, there was a method to her madness. It was made evident in chapter eighteen that Mayella lacked friends and a social life; she was also forced to do all the housework and take care of the
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Mayella was, in her own right, a sort of mockingbird; causing further damage to a victim of savage beatings, negligence, and perhaps even molestation would be a sin. Boo may have been mentally unstable, but he wasn’t a bad person; he too was a mockingbird of his own right, being raised by a father that Calpurnia claimed was “the meanest man ever God blew breath into” (Lee 19). Whether they deserved it or not, all three of these characters received at least a little compassion throughout the novel. After all, even Atticus said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (Lee

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