Critical Response to Harper's Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Meh. Here's my Critical Response for ESL407 again.
I'm actually just posting all these things. . . cause I feel like my space is too dead and I don't know what else to post. HALPHHHHHHH!
Only received a B for this ): I know. . . my writing is super crappy.
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Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird centers mainly around
Atticus Finch, and single parent who is a lawyer and his 2 children, Jem and
Scout. Throughout the novel, we see how effective Atticus’ parenting style is
as it is evident how grown up and mature his children have become by the end of
the novel. One of the key ideas portrayed in the book is about not being quick
to pass judgement and discriminate against anybody. In Chapter 10, when Atticus is teaching Jem
how to shoot, he tells him, “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit
‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
Mockingbirds are pure songbirds and in the book, they are
seen as motifs of innocence, which Lee has done an excellent job in
exemplifying throughout the book. There is a character, Boo Radley, who has not
been seen by the townspeople in over 15 years as he has been hiding in the privacy
of his own home, away from the eyes of the public, however, he is constantly
the target of vicious rumours as everyone still sees him as a horrible monster
and blames every mishap on him, all because when he was younger, he mixed with
the wrong crowd and disturbed the peace of the night. Another character likened
to the mockingbird is Tom Robinson, a Negro whom Atticus is defending as he has
been falsely accused of raping a white girl when the real culprit is actually
Bob Ewell, a white man. Everyone is quick to condemn Tom due to his skin colour
and their narrow-mindedness and discrimination against the blacks, which was
common in that era. In their town, there is severe injustice in the law and
“when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always
wins.” Harper Lee has done an exemplary job in linking these 2 characters to
the motif and has also succeeded in convincing the reader, i.e. me, to stop
judging people too prematurely and take a step back and try to see things from
a different perspective and not let what other people say cloud my judgement or
decision.
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