to kill a mocking bird analysis

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Recommended: Problems with racism in literature

in Harper Lees novel To Kill a Mocking Bird, Lee presents a story of racial prejudice during a time in which racism was a regular thing for most people. Scout tells this story, a young child who doesn’t really understand the prejudice of the country she is growing up in. Through this book, Harper Lee tries to convince the reader not to judge a person by their appearances or what they hear about them. She utilizes several characters to support her argument such as Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. These characters go through hard times because many times they were misconceived as bad people by their appearance or what people said about them.
In this book Harper Lee describes Maycomb County as a place where people fear the unknown. This town is so small that everyone knows each other and all their secrets, except for one person, Boo Radley. Lee portrays Boo Radley as a crazy and dangerous man, but they are all rumors and nobody knows who he really is. That is what makes him so scary. Many rumors are made about him and we find out later on in the book that none of them are true. Some rumors that we hear throughout this book is that he never comes out during the day and only comes out during the night to look through peoples windows. Jem tells Dill, “…Miss Stephanie Crawford said she woke up in the middle of the night one time and saw him looking straight through the window ate her…(pg.16)” Also many people say he stays in his house because he stabbed his father in the leg with a scissor and his father didn’t want to send him to the asylum, he promised to keep Boo in the house. Toward the end of the book, Scout and Jem learn that Boo is nothing like they have heard. The whole time, Boo had been trying to be nice to them and show them he c...

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...ese kinds of things.

Those who feel that this argument is unrealistic express that discrimination does not still go on in our society. People say this because usually they will associate discrimination with black people and white people during the 1930s, but that’s not what discrimination is. Discrimination is the unjust treatment of people who are classified in different categories such as gender, religion, race or age. Like the examples given above, many people still do discriminate. In classrooms boys tend to sit with boys and girls the same. People may think that they don’t judge others because many times they don’t realize what they are doing. Lees argument about discrimination opens the minds of her readers to see what really happens in their society and lets them think about what they can do to change it for the better.

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