Pride In To Kill A Mockingbird

As Albert Einstein once said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen“(Einstein). When a child is going through adolescence in their early to late teen years, what they experience and learn will mold them into the person they become as an adult. In To Kill a Mockingbird, a book made by Harper Lee, a character named Jeremy (Jem) Finch slowly progresses toward adulthood throughout the book. In the beginning of the book, Jem Finch is 10 years old, not yet going through the process of maturity. He still possesses many child-like qualities such as arrogance and dishonesty. Arrogance is shown in Jem when he claimed that he “wasn’t scared of anything” when dared to go on the Radley’s property, when it was obvious …show more content…
This predicament was a hard time for the whole Finch family, but it hit Jem the hardest. He was extremely upset at the injustice of the trial, realizing how harsh the world can be and how little sense the world makes. Jem has a discussion with Atticus about how the case ended up and why Tom Robinson’s charge was so heavy (219). Atticus basically says that the reason why the charge of Tom Robinson was death is because he is black (219). This discussion brings to Jem a yearning for justice, making him into a more reasonable, thoughtful man. Those traits are shown when talking to Scout later in the chapter, when he said “if there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of there why to despise each other?”(227). This shows how much Jem is maturing, seeing that their can’t be just one kind of person, that some people aren’t seen the same as others. The way that Jem sees this situation not only has as an act of injustice but discovers by himself why this happens proves how much he has changed from the child he was at the beginning of the