"It's not necessary to tell all you know...You're not gonna change any of them by talkin...they've got to learn themselves, and when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language" (143).
There were two types of stories that I enjoyed in my late elementary and middle school years: the fantastical fairy tales that carried me away to shining otherworldly realms, and the coming-of-age, fictional memoir. I loved each for differing reasons, but the second category carried a certain attraction that is difficult to unpack. For one, they were often told in first-person POV and created a sense of closeness between the narrator and reader so poignant that it almost conflated the two. While an imaginative story filled with magic and impossibility holds its own appeal, there is something solid and comfortable in the possible. Reading the thoughts of a young girl navigating relationships, education, and the internal narrative of a developing maturity lent credence to the struggles and triumphs I was also experiencing. Others have walked these paths as well, and they conquered them without discovering a hidden ability, traveling to a different dimension, inhabiting a supernatural body with wings or a cape or a horse's lower half.
To Kill a Mockingbird is one of these stories. It tells a tale that is, at least partially, based on the life of its author. She unravels a plot thread that covers the highs and lows, but also the mundane in-between--occurrences that seem unimportant (albeit funny, sad, or touching in some sense), but actually carry symbolic meaning for those who are willing to take the time and meditate upon them. Could our lives also be shaped by such events? Perhaps there are meaningful and important influences happening right in front of us, and we need someone else's story to remind us to keep our eyes open.
1. "If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other" (259)?
The questions. To Kill a Mockingbird has existed in a realm of awed historical preservation almost since its publication, as readers felt its importance as a stirring record of the questions that can start a revolution. As the book itself states, it is the innocence of children that often sets such change into motion. Scout and Jem look at their world with fresh eyes, untainted by the complacency of having been overwhelmed by the world's prejudice for too many years. They ask the simplest of questions, draw the most obvious of connections between the behavior of the adults around them and the contradictory tolerance that their southern good manners dictate. For this reason, TKAM has remained an important and scathing look at the human tendency towards convenient cognitive dissonance, staring at readers through the eyes of capacious youth.
2. "...when I asked Atticus about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business, he didn't mind me much the way I was" (93).
Family and identity. Scout is the narrator of this tale and the forceful heart behind its emotional impact. She is unabashedly herself, climbing the mountains of societal expectation without care or self-doubt. Atticus defends this wild independence, granting her the freedom that comes with the primary male figure in a young girl's life looking at her in approval no matter her perceived failings. Jem has reached a point in adolescence where he must decide if he will adhere to and perpetuate the standards set by the surrounding culture or give these up for redefinition by a new generation. Sometimes he is one and sometimes he is the other, as we often discover to be true of us all. Scout's character, however, juxtaposes this inconsistency. She makes mistakes and blunders her way through the growth of empathy and emotional maturity, but her framework for herself and the world around her stays constant. Her family has provided an environment in which personal identity formation is encouraged.
3. "...the mockingbirds were silent" (108).
The symbolism. The mockingbird is perhaps one of the premier symbols in modern American literature. This novel is almost an allegory at points, breaking into what appear as short parables to extrapolate the importance of the narrative being told. Symbols like this are, of course, an English teachers dream, but they are also invaluable for teaching concepts that elude many adults. Children understand the world through images, not words. They see most clearly what language has perhaps dimmed for those of us more mature in years--the applicable nature of the everyday occurrence. Two young children watch their bookish, lawyer father take up a rifle and shoot the diseased dog, dumb to his actions, weaving his way toward the people he would take with him on his path to ultimate doom. The canker of the town's racism festers unchecked in a humid courtroom. A group of neighbors, looking each other in the eyes, are able to pull the trigger backwards and shoot themselves in the name of perverted justice. Such stories leave a scar upon our hearts, refusing to go numb, so that the events that should impact us as though we had never seen the evil in this world in fact still do.
