Moreover, we continue to have the rites of growing up and the struggle to fit into functional and dysfunctional families.
And there are folks-probably a majority-who have both sides warring within them. There are empathetic and self-centered people. There are open-minded and close-minded people. There are both generous and nasty people in every community, regardless of heavy social issues. This is actually pointing out Lee's genius in To Kill a Mockingbird.
This conjecture may seem to imply a criticism of To Kill a Mockingbird, a complaint that Lee is distracting us from the very important theme of racial injustice in the United States, engaging us in a sort of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in the Deep South.įar from it. It wouldn't be nearly as impactful, but it could be an interesting enough, slightly spooky, read. with the main plot focusing on the evolution of the children's relationship with the mysterious recluse Boo Radley. the feel-good themes of neighbourliness, of not judging by appearances, of sticking with family. The eccentric local characters, their benevolent alliances and their petty rivalries. At times it seems this story of the town could stand on its own as a Southern Gothic-lite tale seen through the eyes of a precocious child. Meanwhile, life in the white part of town goes on languorously in much of the novel as experienced by six-to-nine-year-old tomboy Scout, whose father Atticus Finch is, incidentally, appointed defence lawyer in the rape case. We can tear up over the great injustice being done to those poor black people down there by those ignorant white folks back then. The fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, in which the case unfolds is drawn so well-so lovingly, despite the unsparing revelation of its hideous racial sentiments-that when you get to the parts touching on race they can come across as being specifically about racism in the American south at that time. In ther early going, you could question whether the novel is about racism to any great extent at all. In fact, blacks as a whole are invisible for most of the first half of To Kill a Mockingbird. The trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, on a spurious charge of rape, for which the novel is famous, does not become a focus of the plot until about midway.
Anyone reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time may be surprised to find it is not entirely about racism.
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