To Kill A Mocking Bird

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Author: Harper Lee
My Rating: 6/10
Length: 348 Pages

DESCRIPTION

In this highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Dr. Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

The Book In 3 Sentences

To Kill a Mockingbird is written from the first-person point of view of Scout Finch, who is around six years old when the story begins. She lives in Maycomb, Alabama with her father Atticus and her brother Jem. Atticus is a lawyer and is the most respected man in town. When Tom Robinson, a black man, is falsely accused of raping a white woman, the town’s judge appoints Atticus to defend him.
Why have I only given this book a 6/10 rating? After all, it was seen as one of the great works of the 20th century. Well, it is somewhat dated. I think that if Harper Lee were writing it today (if she were still alive to do so) she would take a whole new approach to get her message across.
This book does not have a happy ending, but that’s what life is like sometimes, right? There is so much about To Kill A Mockingbird that is timeless and Atticus’s lessons still resonate today. If by chance you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend that you at least watch the movie.

High-Level Thoughts

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most frequently challenged books in the US to teach in school, and I can see why due to its themes of rape and use of profanity and racial slurs. But if you can get past it, To Kill a Mockingbird is full of life lessons.

Atticus is pretty much the perfect human and the wisdom he imparts to Scout and Jem is profound. I liked how Harper Lee took her time building up to the actual trial. She shows us years of life in Maycomb so that the reader can truly understand the South in the 1930s. There is a rich cast of supporting characters, all vividly drawn.

It’s tragic to realize that not all that much has changed in how our country treats black people since the time of this book. Black people are still treated unfairly by the criminal justice system quite often, resulting in America’s huge mass incarceration problem.

Who Should Read It?

I think people who are interested in putting in the work to be anti-racist should read this book. I know that’s a bold claim (given I also have it at a 6/10 rating) but here is why:

Since the world is seen through the lens of a curious and innocent 6-year-old girl, it forces the reader to see a different point of view of life that we aren’t used to anymore. A view of understanding, empathy, and outrage at how Tom is treated simply because of the color of his skin - and how awful that is.

How The Book Changed Me

Every human deserves dignity was my biggest takeaway.

Ultimately, whether it is a child, someone who has different beliefs, or someone who might look different from ourselves, every single person deserves dignity. We all were once children. We still have the ability to express our emotions and see the world through a lens of curiosity and innocence. As we go into the rest of our days today and into our futures, we can carry this perspective with us helping us be better each day.

My Top 3 Quotes

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” — Harper Lee, To Kill A Mocking Bird
“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 know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” — Harper Lee, To Kill A Mocking Bird
“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for. I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” — Harper Lee, To Kill A Mocking Bird

Best Big Ideas

Please Note: The following is a collection of my notes and highlights taken straight from the book and online resources such as SparkNotes for classic novels. Most of them are direct quotes. Some are paraphrases. Very few are my own words.

The Importance of Moral Education

Because exploration of the novel’s larger moral questions takes place within the perspective of children, the education of children is necessarily involved in the development of all of the novel’s themes. In a sense, the plot of the story charts Scout’s moral education, and the theme of how children are educated—how they are taught to move from innocence to adulthood—recurs throughout the novel (at the end of the book, Scout even says that she has learned practically everything except algebra). This theme is explored most powerfully through the relationship between Atticus and his children, as he devotes himself to instilling a social conscience in Jem and Scout. The scenes at school provide a direct counterpoint to Atticus’s effective education of his children: Scout is frequently confronted with teachers who are either frustratingly unsympathetic to children’s needs or morally hypocritical. As is true of To Kill a Mockingbird’s other moral themes, the novel’s conclusion about education is that the most important lessons are those of sympathy and understanding, and that a sympathetic, understanding approach is the best way to teach these lessons. In this way, Atticus’s ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him an excellent teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational techniques that she learned in college makes her ineffective and even dangerous.

The Existence of Social Inequality

Differences in social status are explored largely through the overcomplicated social hierarchy of Maycomb, the ins and outs of which constantly baffle the children. The relatively well-off Finches stand near the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most of the townspeople beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the Cunninghams lie below the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells rest below the Cunninghams. But the black community in Maycomb, despite its abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells, enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by persecuting Tom Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make up so much of the adult world are revealed in the book to be both irrational and destructive. For example, Scout cannot understand why Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her consort with young Walter Cunningham. Lee uses the children’s perplexity at the unpleasant layering of Maycomb society to critique the role of class status and, ultimately, prejudice in human interaction.

Prejudice

Discussions about prejudice in general, and racism in particular, are at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. Conflicts over racism drive some of the most compelling and memorable scenes in the novel. Racial conflict causes the two dramatic deaths that occur in the story. On one level, To Kill a Mockingbird represents a simplistic and moralistic view of racial prejudice. White people who are racist are bad, and white people who are not racist are good. Atticus risks his reputation, his position in the community, and ultimately the safety of his children because he is not racist, and therefore good. Bob Ewell falsely accuses a black man of rape, spits on Atticus publicly, and attempts to murder a child because he is racist, and therefore bad. To Kill a Mockingbird does attempt to look at some of the complexities of living in a racist society. Both Scout and Jem confront everything from unpleasantness to murderous hostility as they learn how their family’s resistance to racial prejudice has positioned them against the community at large.

The treatment of prejudice in To Kill a Mockingbird is not only simplistic in terms of morality, but also in terms of perspective. To read the novel one would think racism is a problem that exists between educated, financially stable, moral white people, and ignorant, dirt poor, vicious white people. The black characters in the novel are rarely given a voice on the topic of racism. When they do speak it is largely in terms of gratitude for the good white people of the town and not in terms of anger, frustration, resistance, or hostility towards the culture of racism. When the author does present black characters as trying to resist racist abuses, she shows them doing so by avoiding or retreating, as when Tom Robinson attempts to escape from prison or when Helen Robinson walks through the woods to avoid going past the Ewell house. Black characters in the novel never respond to racism actively and barely respond to it reactively. When a black character is critical of white people, as when Lula challenges Calpurnia for bringing Jem and Scout to the black church, she is ostracized by the rest of the black community, suggesting her complaints against white people are unfounded.

Law

Though the trial of Tom Robinson takes up only about one-tenth of the book, it represents the narrative center around which the rest of the novel revolves. This trial seems intended as an indictment of the legal system, at the least as it exists of within the town of Maycomb. Procedurally, the judge carries out the trial properly. The lawyers select the jury through normal means, and both the defense and prosecution to make their cases. But the all-white jury does not interpret the evidence according to the law, but rather applies their own prejudices to determine the outcome of the case. Tom Robinson’s guilty verdict exemplifies the limitations of the law, and asks the reader to reconsider the meaning of the word “fair” in the phrase “a fair trial.” While Atticus understands that the legal system is flawed, he firmly believes in the legal process. At the same time, Atticus believes the law should be applied differently to different people. He explains to Scout that because she has a good life full of opportunities she should have to obey the lawfully, but he suggests that there are others who have much more difficult lives and far fewer opportunities and that there are times when it is just to let those people break the law in small ways so that they are not overly harmed by the law’s application.

Lying

There are two lies at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. Mayella Ewell says that Tom Robinson raped her, and Heck Tate says that Bob Ewell accidentally stabbed himself. The first lie destroys an innocent man who occupies a precarious social position in Maycomb because of his race. The second lie prevents the destruction of an innocent man who occupies a precarious social position in Maycomb because of his extreme reclusiveness. Taken together, the two lies reflect how deception can be used to harm or to protect. The two lies also reveal how the most vulnerable members of society can be the most deeply affected by the stories people tell about them. Social status also determines who is allowed to tell a lie. During the trial, prosecutor Horace Gilmer confronts Tom Robinson, asking Tom if he is accusing Mayella Ewell of lying. Even though Tom knows full well that Mayella is lying, he cannot say so because in Maycomb the lies of a white woman carry more weight than the truth told by a black man. Atticus, on the other hand, who is white, male, and of a higher class status than Mayella, can accuse her of lying when he suggests that it was really Mayella’s father, not Tom, who beat her.