Comparing Night And To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

Lost Innocence, Violent History Significant historical events can shape how children view the world, as displayed in the realistic fiction novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and in Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. To Kill a Mockingbird contains experiences with racism and classism in the southern town of Maycomb, Alabama. This novel is centered around the trial of Tom Robinson, an innocent Black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman, alongside the narrator, Scout Finch, and her brother, Jem Finch, and his experiences with racism. Night is a memoir with the first person point of view of Elie Wiesel's personal experiences with the Holocaust, which was the organized genocide of over six million Jews during World War II. In

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson gets charged guilty of the rape of Mayella Ewell, a young white woman, and gets accused of the death penalty; Tom Robinson attempts to escape jail just to see his family for the last time, but instead, he gets shot at and dies. Jem does not accept the fact that the police killed him for a crime that Tom did not even commit, and because of the violent racial injustice caused by the Tom Robinson case, Jem realizes that the world is not all perfect and racism can affect a group of people, especially the Black community in southern Alabama. Similarly, in the memoir Night, Elie experiences his first sign of cruelty and violence when he explains, "Then, as if he had suddenly woken up from a heavy dose, he dealt my father such a clout that he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours" (Wiesel 29). Elie is shocked when his father gets abused to the face for asking a simple question to a gypsy, and now he realizes the violent and harsh conditions of the Holocaust, which leads him not to be as innocent as he used to be, along with Jem