Atticus A Hero

493 Words2 Pages
Go Set A Watchman, the original draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, exists, creating controversy all over the Internet. Mockingbird is a piece of literature that English teachers just can’t get enough of, but it’s sequel, Watchman, is a book that readers refuse to read and teachers refuse to teach. So much has changed from the last time we visited the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. Scout, the eternal 10-year-old and narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird, is now 26 years old, living in New York, and prefers to be called her formal name, Jean Louise. Her older brother, Jem, is now dead, but visited in memories throughout the book. However, the biggest change, and what most believe to be the worst, is that Atticus is racist. Commenters are saying that Go Set A Watchman was Harper Lee’s failed novel about race, and that it should never have been published. A bookstore in Michigan is even offering refunds for Watchman and claims…show more content…
Mockingbird, written through the eyes of a child, made reading Watchman, written from a third-person perspective, worthwhile. In the first novel, Atticus is seen as a hero, though often times we forget that we only first saw Atticus in the eyes of young Scout. Atticus is not the morally perfect character some readers suggest. At the end of the novel, he agrees with the sheriff not to reveal who killed Bob Ewell. Also, time has changed the characters we met when we first visited Maycomb. Jean Louise is now a grown woman and starts to flaws in Atticus that she didn’t see before. Who says that time didn’t change Atticus, too? Throughout the story of Mockingbird, Atticus repeatedly tells his children to walk in the shoes of others, and view the world from their perspective. This, along with the other morals of Mockingbird, is being compared to the morals of Watchman, yet few understand that not only are the characters different, but messages given to readers in each story are so
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