To Kill A Mockingbird Empathy Essay

Young and navie children rarely have a sense of empathy towards others when they are still developing their communications. It is an emotion that comes from the heart, and must be genuine in order to be effective. Empathy is often learned through the event of coming of age which is evident in a significant passage in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In this passage Scout can finally see the world from the perspective of Boo Radley, a childhood myth. She walks Boo back to his front porch which she spent many previous summers looking into past the metal gate. Scout can see the unexpected characteristics of Boo Radley through a different point of view, and realizes how the stereotypes of the town affects the roles of different people. Scout’s …show more content…
The novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is set in the 1930s in the southern state of Alabama where racism was a part of their culture. Tom Robinson who was falsely accused for raping a white woman, Mayella, was declared guilty, purely based on the fact that Tom was a black man and Mayella was a white woman (282). The racism was part of the context of the novel for the time period of which it took place.The people who had prejustice ideas made up the majority of the town. Scout had to overcome the established ideals of the town in order to mature. To add on to the oddities of Maycomb, the destiny for most of the people in the town were based on what part of society their parents and ancestors were part of. Jem describes the groups of people in Maycomb country, “‘The thing about it is, our kind of folks don’t like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don’t like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate and despise the colored folks’” (302-303). The fate of the town was already decided, and people already had assigned roles. The old small town environment allowed the predetermined course of people to be plausible. The setting is what enabled it for everyone in the town to know the social status of each other, and the story behind every child and adult. People already knew what their role of the town was supposed to be in the town’s drama and events. Scout was still …show more content…
In To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee was able to capture Scout’s change of mindset where she identified the perspective of Boo Radley, a misunderstood character. By putting herself in the shoes of Boo, she realised how this innocent man helped her family her entire life. This goes to show how early judgement of a person can be false when one does not recognize the perspective of the other