To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To eliminate a mockingbird by harper lee(prenominal)To scratch off a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.Harper Lees only novel to date is To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960 yet set in the thirties in Americas deep-south. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and was speedily made into a successful film starring Gregory Peck. The popularity that the novel straightaway attracted endures to modern epochs.The semi-autobiographical story concerns the trial of an innocent black universe, turkey cock Robinson for the mishandle of a white woman, Mayella Ewell and a wheel this central drama the novelist has woven a tale which reveals the appalling nature of wrong in many forms, not save that of colour, as her mocking birds which must not be harmed because they do none, suffer from the cruelty and ignorance of those virtually them.The story is told through the eyes of the nipper narrator, Scout, who lives, along with her brother, Jem, with their father, genus genus Atticus, the town law yer and destined to represent the ill-fated Tom Robinson, and their cook/housekeeper and friend, Calpurnia. In his attitude to Calpurnia, as to much in his life, Atticus challenges the contemporary view because though Calpurnia is black, she is treated as a section of the family, much to the annoyance of his sister, Alexandra. Atticus is in fact the pith by which Lee examines much that is wrong with Maycomb society, from his lack of prejudice, to his defence of Mrs. Dubose and darn Radley and his quick means of challenging the education system which denies Scout the freedom to empathize by simply ignoring it. The motto by which he lives is that, you never actually understand a person until you consider things from his point of viewuntil you climb into his whittle and walk around in it and this he passes on to his children. However, Lee is knifelike to avoid actualise Atticus appear patently and self-consciously champic, as in the mad-dog incident and, indeed, his defence of Tom Robinson, he only acts heroically when he is compelled to do so.Lee treats the reader to a succession of humorous, gracious and engaging characters as the story develops, none more so than the glacial and mysterious Boo Radley and the quaintly eccentric Dill (the latter is ideal to have been based on the author Truman Capote, with whom Lee grew up). Boo is in a sense both the greatest victim and the ultimate hero in the rule book and in many ways Dill is the comic-relief as well as cosmos the representative of what we would now call a dysfunctional family as much as is Boo.By using the fraud of the child narrator, Lee invites both advantages and disadvantages. She gains the innocence and naivety of Scout unneurotic with her ingenuous curiosity and her ability to diffuse tense situations by her indwelling innocence but she also has the commensurate disadvantage of having to get round the problems that necessarily attach to a child being the principal means by which a t rial for rape is discussed. Lee solves this in the master(prenominal) by having Scout overhear conversations which she does not fully understand but which the reader, of course, does. This dual narrative relationship with the reader is one of the causal agencys why Lees narrative technique has been so highly praised.However, the main reason why the novel has achieved such a seminal place in the development of the American novel is that it was published at a time when racial tension was at its height in America and being challenged as never before by the Civil Rights Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. Thus, by showing the injustices which black Americans continued to suffer via a narrative set nearly thirty years before, Lee addresses a contemporary problem by means of the historical resonance with which the book is permeated. Emblematic of this is the trial of Tom Robinson which had a contemporary connective in a similar trial in the 1930s. Tom, one of Lees principal mocking birds, is manifestly innocent and proven to be physically incapable of having committed the crime by Atticus Why average people go stark raving mad when anything involving a black comes up, is something I dont pretend to understand, he declares and the reader shares his lack of comprehension, making prejudice manifestly against reason. The fact that this does not and cannot save Tom in an atmosphere which seethes with racial hatred adds to the imperative of the narrativeIn the cryptic courts of mens hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.However, Lee is even-handed in her depiction of racial tension, since when Calpurnia takes Scout and Jem to the church where the black residents of Maycomb worship, they are not universally welcomed and certainly Tom is not the only victim of prejudice in the story. Boo Radley, imprisoned by his well-meaning but misguided father after(prenominal) a teenage misdemeanour, has b ecome the subject of much gossip and conjecture. Indeed, the children, Scout, Jem and Dill, make him the subject of their daily dramatics, supplanting the Dracula stories with which they have become bored. Atticus stops this as soon as it starts and the irony is that a association blossoms secretly between Boo and the children, of which the culmination is Boos bringing the lives of Scout and Jem when they are attacked by the vicious Bob Ewell. Scout reiterates the idea, somewhat altered, that Atticus uttered early in the novel, that you never really kip down a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them and by now the reader fully understands the meaning of those words, just as the child does.In conclusion, perhaps it is true to say that the digest achievement of Harper Lees novel is to portray racial hatred and a multiplicity of tensions motivated by misapprehension and prejudice via the microcosm of small-town America which is Maycomb. Indeed, perhaps readers con tinue to respond to To Kill a Mockingbord only because of the prejudices which sadly remain.BibliographyJerilyn Fisher and Ellen S.Silber, Women in Literature reading material through the genus Lens of Gender, (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2003).Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud Alabamas Poor Whites, (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1989).Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockinbird, (Arrow, London, 1989).Claudia Durst Johnson, Understanding to Kill a Mockingbird A learner Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents, (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1994).Annie Kasper, General Semantics in to Kill a Mockingbird, ETC. A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 63, 2006.Dean Shackelford, The Female articulatio in To Kill a Mockingbird Narrative Strategies in occupy and Novel, The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 50, 1996.Renee Swanson, The Living Dead What the Dickens Are College Students Reading?, Policy Review, No. 67, 1994.