To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee :: To Kill a Mockingbird Essays

Analysis of Major Characters reconnoitre - Scout is a very unusual little girl, two in her own qualities and in her social position. She is unusually intelligent (she learns to read before beginning school), unusually confident (she fights boys without fear), unusually thoughtful (she worries about the inborn goodness and evil of mankind), and unusually good (she always acts with the best intentions). In terms of her social identity, she is unusual for being a tomboy in the squared-toe and proper Southern world of Maycomb.One quickly realizes when reading To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout is who she is because of the way Atticus has raised her. He has nurtured her mind, conscience, and individualism without bogging her down in fussy social hypocrisies and nonions of propriety. While most girls in Scouts position would be wearing dresses and learning manners, Scout, thanks to Atticuss hands-off parenting style, wears overalls and learns to climb trees with Jem and Dill. She does not always grasp social niceties (she tells her teacher that one of her fellow students is too poor to pay her back for lunch), and human behavior very much baffles her (as when one of her teachers criticizes Hitlers prejudice against Jews while indulging in her own prejudice against blacks), but Atticuss protection of Scout from hypocrisy and social pressure has rendered her open, forthright, and well meaning.At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no experience with the evils of the world. As the novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form of racial prejudice, and the basic teaching of her character is governed by the question of whether she will emerge from that contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like sibilate Radley and Tom Robinson. Thanks to Atticuss wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has a great capacity for evil, it also ha s a great capacity for good, and that the evil can often be mitigated if one approaches others with an outlook of sympathy and understanding. Scouts development into a person capable of assuming that outlook marks the culmination of the novel and indicates that, whatever evil she encounters, she will retain her conscience without becoming cynical or jaded. Though she is still a child at the end of the book, Scouts perspective on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a near grown-up.