- Themes in to kill a mockingbird with quotes for free#
- Themes in to kill a mockingbird with quotes series#
In To Kill a Mockingbird she continues in the same rich vein.
Themes in to kill a mockingbird with quotes for free#
In fact Maycomb Junction, ‘a courtesy title’, was located in Abbott County twenty miles away! However, she tells us that the ‘bus service was erratic and seemed to go nowhere, but the Federal Government had forced a highway or two through the swamps, thus giving the citizens an opportunity for free egress.’ However, Lee tells us that few took advantage of this opportunity! Then in one of those Harper Lee epiphany moments, one of those lightning bolts she releases now and then, she perceptively describes her hometown as a place where, ‘If you did not want much, there was plenty.’
In Go Set a Watchman she says that Maycomb County is, ‘a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements’, it is, ‘so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilection over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.’ It is so remote, ‘no trains went there’. It is, in effect, a remote backwater bypassed by progress, the perfect playground of her youth, and the perfect cauldron for change. She describes it as an isolated place, in effect it is an Everyplace – the town, ‘had remained the same for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cotton fields and timberland’. She tells us that one went to Maycomb, ‘to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his mules vetted’. It is clear to me that the real-life Monroeville, Alabama of her youth becomes the fictional Maycomb, Alabama of her novels. I want to focus for a little while on the setting of both of Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Rather than its being simply a novel that explores and exploits the topic of racial prejudice in a small town in the Deep South, it makes Maycomb, Alabama, a microcosm of American society in the 1930’s. Beneath the surface, however, there exist a number of complex and very important themes and motifs. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is, therefore, a novel that deceives the reader with its apparent simplicity. A classic bildungsroman forces the young character at its heart to grow up and face harsh adult realities long before he or she should normally have to cope with life’s harsh lessons.
Themes in to kill a mockingbird with quotes series#
The novel is a classic bildungsroman where Scout, the central character and narrator, is taken from a state of innocence and brought to a state of enlightenment as a result of a series of misadventures that are recounted in the novel. Even she can see the injustice and yet the adults fail to see the criminal miscarriage of justice and toxic levels of racial prejudice that lie at the heart of the novel. We are given a glimpse of modern American society through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl called Scout. To Kill a Mockingbird is a modern reinterpretation of the old fable The Emperor Has No Clothes.
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