Appearances In To Kill A Mockingbird

The false aquisations of people’s livelihood has been looked down upon since the beginning of the Renaissance, and from there on, had multiple sayings and books about such topics. But no piece of literature shows mastery in this theme better than Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which takes place in Maycomb, a sleepy little town in Alabama, during the 1930s, a time period where the common man did not second guess people’s appearances. However that does not mean that there is not another, more hidden story behind said appearance, as seen with a multitude of people. Harper Lee teaches her audience that more often than not, people’s appearances can be truly deceptive,
Dolphus Raymond is a prime example of how Lee deceives the reader with appearances

The first summer when Dill came to Maycomb, Jem and Scout gave him a rundown of the town and it terror “Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time” (Lee 16). The dehumanization of Boo Radley sickens the readers, and gives them a malicious notion towards Boo Radley. “He was still leaning against the wall. He had been leaning against the wall when I came into the room, his arms folded across his chest. [...] As I pointed he brought his arms down and pressed the palms of his hands against the wall. [...] I looked from his hands to his sand-stained khaki pants; my eyes traveled up his thin frame to his torn denim shirt. [...] His lips parted into a timid smile, and our neighbor’s image blurred with my sudden tears. ‘Hey, Boo,’ I said.” (Lee 362). The detail put into this scene about how average he

Dubose, who harassed Jem and scout everytime they passed by, in the end, was the bravest person they ever knew. All three of these characters could not have shown their true state properly if they were not written by Harper Lee, literary