The Hypocrisy of Humanity Depicted in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

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Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, has many stories from Scouts’ little town in Alabama that teaches the reader the good and bad sides of the human being. When all these come together, the result is this fantastic novel. One of the stories that stand out is the one when Mrs. Gates and Cecil Jacobs have a conversation in the classroom. They talk about Adolph Hitler and the malicious things he did to the Jewish people. Mrs. Gates tries to tell her students that what he did was wrong in a very firm tone of voice. At this point in the story, the reader feels anger for everything the Nazis did. However, the main point of this passage is to make the reader realize how two-faced Mrs. Gates is.

In this novel, Harper Lee implies that humanity should be less hypocritical. When Cecil Jacobs makes his presentation about Adolph Hitler, Mrs. Gates comments about it. She teaches the children in her classroom that what this man did was very wrong since he killed many Jews just because he did not like them. Nevertheless, the reader finds this very paradoxical for the reason that she does not have respect for black-colored-people. Mrs. Gates does not seem to understand the bad example that she is providing to the children she is teaching to. Her hypocrisy does not help to fulfill her role as teacher: to teach and provide the skills and principles children will have to use later in life. The author of this novel has given the reader this story to symbolize the hypocrisy that one finds in today’s society, to show that sometimes and most of the time, the human beings talk a lot but do not look at their own actions or execute what they are teaching.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird shows so many characteristics of today’s society. Among thes...

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...ould be more honest and less hypocritical. An individual who is a great example of this is Al Gore, the Oscar-Winner for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. He tells audiences the way they should live and how they should manage their life-styles to help save the environment mean while he is riding in style and waists twelve times more electric energy compared to an average family in a year. Harper Lee has used the narrative point of view, characterization and irony to develop a more dramatic effect of hypocrisy between Mrs. Gates and black-colored-people. It is very unfortunate that there are people like Mrs. Gates and Mr. Al Gore in today’s world. For this reason, every individual should strive to be better as a person to make their community a better place to live in and to provide an appropriate example to those who will live in it in the next generations.

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