Comparing To Kill A Mockingbird And Elie Wiesel's Night

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night capture two vastly different scenarios that capture accounts of racism and the Holocaust through the eyes of children. To Kill a Mockingbird tracks a young girl, Scout Finch, who lives in the segregated town, Maycomb, Alabama. Scout’s upbringing takes place in a time when racial pressures are at their peak, and her father, Atticus’s defense of an accused black man, Tom Robinson, highlights the discrimination and prejudice that both Atticus and Tom confront. Instead, Night reveals the story of a young Jewish teenager whose life flips when the Nazis send him and his family to Auschwitz, where they discover the atrocities of the Holocaust. The two texts grant readers a deeper understanding

Through the parallel experiences of Scout Finch and Elie Wiesel, Lee and Wiesel poignantly illustrate the universal theme of loss of childhood innocence amidst the complexities of human cruelty and injustice. After Atticus loses the trial, and Tom is sentenced, he explains to Jem that “something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins’” (Lee 251). Until this point, Scout’s worldview has been naive and shaped by the ideals of Atticus. However, his admission of the unjustness of the legal system forces Scout to question all of her values, and directly confront the cruelness of reality. After Scout and Jem's attempted murder, Bob Ewell was found “‘lyin’ on the ground under that tree down yonder with a kitchen knife stuck up under his ribs’” (305). This traumatic experience represents the end of Scout's naivety as racism has directly impacted Scout's existence as a