Unfortunately, difficult childhood experiences still define adulthood even today. Harper Lee illustrates how childhoods are being shown as innocent, as well as how they can shape a person's future. In To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, she describes how difficult childhood experiences shape the future of kids; in America today, progress has not been made. Childhood is described as a time when children are young, innocent, and filled with a lack of knowledge when they are being put into these situations. In this novel, Jem and Scout, Jem’s sister, go through many troubles finding the truth about their surrounding racial community to being more mature and grown up after watching a trial about an African American being accused of raping a white woman.
Many people go through many harsh, different obstacles in life that morph them into the kind of people they are today. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the author, Harper Lee uses literary elements to showcase how a child grows into who they are and the contributing factors that may fall into their path and their learning experiences. Lee uses the scene where Jem destroys the flowers of Mrs. Dubose to portray a coming of age moment. He does this because she is racist and constantly nags at them about their father. His punishment is to read to her everyday for a month.
In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem and Scouts changing perspective of Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley represents a coming of age moment because it demonstrates a breaking away from the childlike imagination that had previously explained all of their questions and superstitions about the Radley’s. A coming-of-age moment is the transition of thinking that occurs when someone learns empathy. At the start of the novel, in many situations, Scout and Jem demonstrate childish behavior and thinking when Jem is taunted into touching the side of the Radley home by Scout and Dill. The book reads, “Jem threw open the gate and sped to the side of the house, slapped it with his palm and ran back past us” (18). From this portion of the novel we can tell that Jem and Scout clearly regarded the Radley home and its occupants with novelty and even fear.
Within the book To Kill A Mockingbird the narrator is a little girl by the name of Scout. She lives in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama where there’s so much excitement and drama. Throughout the book the little girl Scout and her older brother Jeremy, known as Jem, go through many challenges and events such as trying to find out the secrets of the Radley’s. The biggest obstacle they face is the fact that their father, they refer to as Atticus, has to defend a man of color as he has been accused of rape. The theme, as know the not told life lesson learned throughout the book, was you should treat people with respect and have empathy for others.
In the third chapter, Scout is first introduced to her first grade teacher, Miss Caroline. Scout is punished for correcting her and talking back for trying to explain the a student by the name of Walter Cunningham could not afford a lunch and wouldn’t accept the money given by Miss Caroline. Outraged, Scout assaults Walter and Jem manages to pull her off of him and after school Atticus discusses with Scout that she must learn to walk in Miss Caroline’s and Walter’s shoes. Later on, Scout finally understands the importance of empathy after Arthur(Boo) Radley saves the children and Scout talks with Boo in person and walks him home.
Have you ever done something you regret, and wish you could fix it? To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is a coming of age story about Scout and Jem, two kids living in a town infested with racism. Although the book was published in 1960, it emphasizes the absurd reality that people experienced during the great depression in 1930. Lee uses the elements of conflict, setting, and character in chapter 11 to display maturing as being the bigger person and learning to compromise to be successful in life. To begin, Lee makes it translucent that they have conflicts with Mrs. Dubose perpetually when they encounter each other.
The novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is about two kids, Jem and Scout, and their childhood in their small town Maycomb, Alabama. In the beginning of the novel, Jem and Scout were two innocent kids playing in the summer sun, until school came along. Jem was about twelve throughout the novel and Scout was eight, and considering that Jem was twelve in the novel, he was changing. During the middle of the novel a rape trial occurred, which included a black man being accused by a white woman of first-degree rape. Atticus, the kid’s father was defending the african american man; Tom Robinson.
Many people have coming-of-age moments in life. If it's by an event, ritual, or even a piece of information, people still have coming-of-age moments in life. To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel by Harper Lee, is a coming-of-age novel that takes place in the Jim Crow South. The narrator of this novel is a young girl named Jean Lousie “Scout” Finch. She is learning about racism in the 1930s in Alabama, as her father, Atticus Finch, defends a black man, Tom Robison, who was accused of raping a woman.
Maturing is something everyone goes through in life whether you go through it early or a little later in life. In the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee shows a lot about maturing. Growing up in a small town in Maycomb, Alabama where life was a lot more different from today, you mature much different and in different ways. Jem is one person who matures through the whole story and makes realizations about people around him, including his dad, Tom Robinson, and Mrs. Dubose. Jem goes into the story thinking his dad is just some old man but as he gets older, he realizes there is more to his dad.
Courage is not strength or skill, it’s simply standing up for what you believe in and what is right. This is the theme that was enrolled after Jem destroys Mrs.Dubose’s camellias and after she died in chapter 11. This passage also reveals Jem’s coming of age moment. After using conflict, symbolism, and point of view, Harper Lee was able to connect the theme with Jems coming of age moment.
As verbalized by the diarist Anne Frank herself, “‘Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands’” (Goodreads 1). Coming of age is a process depicted through movies and novels through the Bildungsroman plot line. The protagonist, in this form of a plot line, has to face society and its difficulties. The protagonist inclines to have an emotional loss, which triggers the commencement of the journey itself.
As we grow older, most of us learn not to judge others until we understand their lives and how they live them. However, the younger population is generally not accustomed to this and usually believe that almost everyone lives life like them or similar to them. A massive part of aging is learning, which is just what the main character of To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout, is beginning to understand. In the given excerpt, Scout’s father Atticus teaches her to look through the eyes of other people before judging them or their situation.
While school may teach lessons, they are certainly not valuable life lessons. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird repeatedly shows the ineffectiveness of the education system in a child’s morals. To Kill A Mockingbird takes place in the Great Depression era in Alabama, where education was not the best. Teachers would only seek to teach their classes average, everyday lessons rather than valuable life teachings.
Miss Caroline might have assumed that all the kids in her class could not read until she heard Scout read. Scout wanted to prove she was ahead of the other children and Miss Caroline was not happy about it; she even assumed that Scout’s father, Atticus, was teaching her to read. Scout was also surprised to hear that Jem did not want her to tag along with him while at school, he said ‘not bother him’ and she was not to approach hin requests to enact a chapter of Tarzan and the Ant Men.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a story that takes place during the Great Depression in a small town located in southern Georgia in the 1930s. The book focuses on Jean Louise “Scout” and Jeremy Atticus “Jem” and their coming of age and the major events that made the two grow up. One of the events was the trial of the Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, in which their father, Atticus Finch, was defending Tom, a man of color. Mockingbirds are used throughout the book to represent people that were harmed by the society even though they were innocent. There is a common misinterpretation of the meaning behind the Mockingbird leading many to believe that Scout is the Mockingbird in the story.