Examples Of Life Lessons In To Kill A Mockingbird

687 Words3 Pages
Lee’s Life Lessons Throughout life, many life lessons are learned. In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, she displays many different life lessons. Lee’s novel was published in the 1960’s, but was set in the 1930’s. Which is when she grew up. The south in the 1930’s was a very harsh place. This is during times of the Great Depression; the Depression was hard on everyone. Not to mention that colored people in the South were still treated lower than white people. Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird portrays many life lessons, but the most influential are discrimination, morality, and compassion. In this novel, many different types of discrimination are shown. Certainly, discrimination towards colored people is the obvious one. However, people are also discriminated based on their gender and their social class…show more content…
Lee uses Atticus to display compassion in a number of ways. When Mrs. Dubose yells at the children; saying that Atticus is a bad person for defending a negro, resulting in Jem tearing up her flowers. Atticus does not lash out at Mrs. Dubose for the things she says, but he simply explains to the kids, that she grew up during the Civil War era and she is not to blame for her feelings towards negroes. That is just how she was raised. Another example is when Mr. Ewell spits in Atticus’ face. Instead of physically or verbally “reprimanding” him, Atticus simply wipes of the spit and walks away. He later tells Jem, “The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that’s something i’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and i’d rather it be me than a household of children out there. You understand?” (292). When he says that, he is saying that he can get past the spitting because it could possibly same Mayella and the other children from one extra
Open Document