To Kill a Mockingbird analys

To Kill a Mockingbird

Characters

At the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout was an innocent, good-hearted five year old child who didn´t havet that much experience with the evil part of life. But as the novel continued, Scout made her first contact with evilness in a sertain racial prejudice, and the basic development of Scout as a character is questionmarked of whether she´ll emerge from this evil contact with her fully optimism intact or whether she´ll be punished and bruised by others, get hurt in some way, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. Thanks to Atticus’s wise words and thoughts, Scout learns that even if humanity has a major capacity for evil, it still contains a great capasity of good, and that the evil can be cured in a way if you approaches oother people with an open mind and no judging thoughts and a look of sympathy and understanding. Scout’s development into a person who will be capable of managing that outlook marks a lot of the culmination of the novel and indicates one particular thing, that whatever evil she´s about to face, she´ll regain her conscience without becoming a person who is cynical or jaded. Even though she  is still a child at the end of the novel, Scout’s perspective on life itself develops from an innocent child into a almost grown-up person.

Ironically, though Atticus is a almost heroic character in the novel and a highly respected man in Maycomb, neither Jem or Scout consciously idolizes Atticus in the first part of the novel. Both are embarrassed of that he is older than all of the other fathers and that he neither hunt or fish, wich is the most popular thing by all in Maycomb. But Atticus’s wise parenting skills, which he tells us in Chapter 30 by saying, “Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him,” finally wins Jems and Scouts respect. By the end of the novel, especially Jem, is fiercely faithful to Atticus (Scout, who still is a small girl, adores him uncritically). Though Atticus´s children’s attitude toward him evolves, he is characterized throughout the novel by his absolute consistency. He stands determindly committed to justice and thoughtfully willing to see matters from the perspectives of other humans. He doesn´t develop at all in the novel but retains these sertain qualities in equal measure, making Atticus the novel’s moral guide and the voice of conscience and justice.

Setting

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summers day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum." Page 5

The descriptive detail paints a good picture of the small village of Maycomb, which provides a greater perspective of Scout's feelings about Maycomb. To begin with, the narrator build up the setting for the novel and sets the mood of a quiet and quite dull town.

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in, as mentioned before, the small village Maycomb County, an imaginary populated area in southern Alabama. The time is set in early 1930s, this was the years of the Great Depression when especially poverty and unemployment were majorly widespread across the United States. Four parts of the deep South like Maycomb County, the Depression didn´t mean that much outside what were usual, it meant only that the bad times that the town had been dealing with for decades, got a little bit worse. These rural parts of America had been poor and undeveloped for a long time. Coloured people worked for a low sallary in the fields and at different farms. White farmers though, were more likely to own land and the farms inside their land, but they were at a critical stage when it come sto owning physical cash. It was common and often seen that children walked to school barefoot,  with that they suffer ringworm and other diseases. Even though automobiles had been driving around for some years now, most of the farm families still depended on their horses for transportation and plowing their fields.

Language

The novel is written in a modern American English, and the style of it is basically informal, wich is quite obvious since the narrator is a small child. However, the author doesn´t atempt to keep the language within the limits of a small child's vocabulary mind or alternative of expression. A wide spred range of language is beeing used in the novel, and if I were to study it, the first step would be to identify the different levels of style wich is used. This is easy, since the differenses in the language correspond to the levels in social class. The African-American dialect variates from the white; the more rich white people speak more grammatically correct than the more poor whites; highly educated characters, like Atticus and his brother Jack, tend speak more elegantly English than the town officials for example Heck Tate.

 When listing the difference in language in the novel I would try to analyse the author's meaning of using them(the different language/dialects). First, differences in the social class and by educational status are revealed by, differing usee of language. Secondly, the individual character is often described by distinctive style of talking (wich we can see in the cases of Atticus and Bob Ewell). Finally, attitudes to the moral issues can sometimes be detected by the analysis of the language, even when the people belonging to the same social class and beacause of that they might be expected to use some identical words. You could, for example, look at the terms used by different rich white persons and refer that to the African-American person – some might say "nigger", some might say "darky", and maybe somebody would us the word "Negro", others tend say "coloured persons" - and then take the word they use as a sign of their racial attitude. A minor ex. of the same type of using language is to be found in the announcing names used by different characters for Scout, the narrator. Friends call her by the name Scout; enemies rather like to call her Jean Louise.