Theme Of Innocence In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Part one of the novel focusses on childhood life, representing the theme of innocence, but also of prejudice. The novel is told from Scout’s point of view, with the limitations of a child she doesn’t understand everything that happens or why. She states quite blankly ‘Radley pecans would kill you’. What’s ironic about this is that what she says is actually this point of view of the Maycomb townspeople: it’s just something she’s repeating without questioning it. Sometimes she makes perceptive interpretations because her innocence is also free of prejudice. She can see through the pretentions of Maycomb: “bought cotton”, she says, is ‘a polite term for doing nothing’. At times she becomes contaminated by others’ prejudices as where she says “he’s…show more content…
Boo Radley is one of the mockingbirds in the book, but at first, we see him (through the eyes of prejudice) as a monster. This brings out the theme of being guilty until proven innocent, a theme brought to deadly effect in the Tom Robinson plot. At first, we scoff at Scout’s childish superstitions and fear of Boo, as where she talks of a ‘malevolent phantom’. She states quite plainly as fact that he ‘dined on raw squirrels’, ‘cats’ and says matter of factly, that’s why his hands were ‘always covered in blood’. The way Lee writes, it’s almost like a fairytale monster made real: it’s a weird mix of plain simple style with outlandish ‘facts’ which we can hardly believe are true. We think at first this is just childish fantasy, then Lee keeps repeating ‘People said...’ and we realise the whole town is full of this gossip: it’s the adults too. Childhood monsters are sinister - to a point. What’s really sinister is the witch-hunt mentality of the town, which comes to a brutal conclusion with the guilty verdict on Tom…show more content…
Boo is described as an ‘unknown entity’: the very unknown-ness is what scares them. Scout focusses heavily on Boo at the start of the novel, giving this concept of childish monsters a lot of emphasis. It’s hard for us to tell what’s real and what’s not, which may echo the fears and prejudice at the later trial as Atticus strives to uncover what really happened (and what didn’t). By making this parallel, Lee shows up how thin the veneer of civilization is in the adult world: laid over fear of monsters. Atticus tells the kids to stop ‘tormenting’ Boo, which we later link to the tormenting of Tom Robinson. The kids are attracted to Boo, ‘fascinated’ by him as much as they’re scared, just as Mayella is fascinated by the strangeness of the black
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