To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee: Character Analysis

If a 6 year old and a 50 year old were asked the same question, their responses would most likely differ. Why? While the 6 year old has a basic understanding of how the world works, the 50 year old has 10 times the experience and knows more about what the world than the 6 year old does because they are naive and innocent compared to the 50 year old. However, the 50 year old’s experience comes with a price of that childhood innocence. Harper Lee has written this into To Kill A Mockingbird as a commonly found theme among the events in the story. To Kill A Mockingbird follows the events in the life of Scout Finch, the main character, over three summers within her small southern town of Maycomb, Alabama. Scout, along with her brother Jem, is pushed …show more content…
In the beginning, Scout, and Jem for the most part, see the people of their town as the wholesome people they appear to be. For example, Scout sees Mr. Cunningham and the Cunningham’s as hardworking and quiet people, they don’t take favors from anyone and that’s how it’s always been (26-29).However, she soon learns during the time of the trial that he isn’t what he appears. Quiet Mr. Cunningham ends up being one of the faces in the crowd of angry racists come to lynch Tom Robinson. When Scouts arrives to the scene to help Atticus and sees his face in the crowd, she treats him politely like the entire situation was completely normal, she even tells him to say hi to his son for her. Scout later on figures out what had went on that night that Mr. Cunningham and the other men had come after Tom Robinson, they had come to hurt him and maybe even Atticus (203-206). She realizes that not all people are what they appear to be, that quiet Mr. Cunningham wasn’t all to quiet and wholesome as she once thought. As well as Mr. Cunningham, the men of the jury were people of her town, people of the town she thought to be good and fair. These same men sentenced an obviously innocent man to a life behind bars due to their own racism stopping them from thinking otherwise. Both of these things takes, yet again, another piece of that youth-like innocence from Scout, and Jem for that matter as he was the most …show more content…
Who they were when they were in the beginning of the book had changed to who they were in the end due to their growth as people, for better or worse is debatable. However, as the children simply must grow up and confront the adult world due to it be completely inevitable, this is not a bad thing. Their coming of age is a difficult transition but their loss of some childhood innocence makes them more perceptive and sympathetic to the people around them. To refer to a previous example, they become more sympathetic and compassionate towards Boo Radley. They think of him more humanely now rather than earlier on. Scout even imagined talking to Boo as if the pretend monster-Radley game and the rumors of him had never existed, asking him how he was and telling him how nice the weather was (326). And this get driven home when Scout gets to meet Boo Radley face to face for the first time after he had brought Jem home to safety after they had been attacked by Mr. Ewell (362). She talks to him gently, as she understands he isn’t used to talking and interacting with people usually, and even “escorts” him home. Notice she does not “help” him home, but “escorts” him. The use of this word indicates she means to maintain a sense of humility in him. This drives the theme home in the end by conveying that her experience with Boo Radley and the events of the Tom Robinson