Archetypes In To Kill A Mockingbird

Heroes and villains, your usual story right? Well Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is far from it. In this novel Harper Lee uses southern gothic literature to tell the story. Gothic literature is a genre of southern writing. The stories often focus on grotesque themes. While it may include supernatural elements it mainly focuses on damaged, even delusional characters. In her novel Harper Lee utilizes the gothic archetypes of the hero, the monster, and the innocents to portray Maycomb’s crisis of conscience during the trial.

Our hero in To Kill A Mockingbird is Atticus Finch. In this story Atticus finch is a lawyer whose morality and reason makes him the hero of the story. For example in this quote “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you

I felt sick. … Jem was standing in a corner of the room, looking like the traitor he was. "Dill, I had to tell him," he said. "You can't run three hundred miles off without your mother knowin'." In this quote Dill is found under scouts bed because he ran away from home because his new father didn’t spend time with him. In this quote "Dill Harris could tell the biggest ones I ever heard. Among other things, he had been up in a mail plane seventeen times, he had been to Nova Scotia, he had seen an elephant, and his granddaddy was Brigadier General Joe Wheeler and left him his sword." He tells outrageous stories to make his life look good and compensate for what is not there.

In her novel Harper Lee utilizes the gothic archetypes of the hero, the monster, and the innocents to portray Maycomb’s crisis of conscience during the trial. So all in all in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird we have Hero (Atticus Finch), our villain (Bob Ewell), and our innocence (Dill). At the end our hero is the victor but our character Dill has forever lost his innocence, as well as Bob Ewell losing his