Examples Of Compassion In To Kill A Mockingbird

Scout’s Lessons of Compassion

As children grow up, they begin to understand compassion. In To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, a six year-old named Scout learns a thing or two about the world around her in the 1930’s small town of Maycomb. She is going through many hard events such as racist trials, nasty neighbors, and real-life monsters. For such a young girl, certain things are hard to come by on her own, but because of these events, and many more, her naive spirit is changed forever. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout learns about compassion by interacting with Walter Cunningham, Mrs. Dubose, and Boo Radley.

To begin with, Walter Cunningham has a big impact on Scout’s learning about compassion. In the very beginning of the book,

Dubose. Scout and Jem do not like Mrs. Dubose. They think that she is mean and cruel. Scout explains that “ if she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behavior, and given a melancholy prediction on what we would be when we grew up, which was always nothing” (Lee 132). This just goes to show how awful Mrs. Dubose treats Jem and Scout and how they feel about her in return. Because of this, they set somewhat of a boundary for themselves from Mrs. Dubose’s house to the Radley house as “passing Mrs. Dubose’s house was odious because Mrs. Dubose was herself odious” (May 54). However, she sees how Atticus is always kind to her, despite her harassment of the whole family. Anytime they pass by her house, Atticus yells “good evening, Mrs. Dubose! You look like a picture this evening!” (Lee 133). This shows Scout that compassion does not always have to be mutual. By Atticus’s example, Scout can see that anything as simple as a hello and a compliment can help someone out, no matter who they may be. Atticus knows everything that Mrs. Dubose is going through with her addiction and how all she wants is to die a drug-free death. In addition, by going to see Mrs. Dubose, Jem and Scout helped her stay off morphine for longer periods of time. By them going and reading to her, she can be distracted from it, and they can

In the beginning of the book, the kids think Boo is a monster. The children think his hands are stained with blood because of the animals he eats and that he drools when he walks, but Boo becomes “Scout’s most personal lesson in judging others based upon surface appearance” (Felty 298). This shows how she thinks all these things about him because of how he looks but as she is exposed to real life monsters she learns that she cannot make assumptions because of how someone looks. The people of Maycomb say “people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated” though it was later found boo was not the culprit, “people still looked to the Radley place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions” (Lee 10). She sees how he isn’t the “‘malevolent phantom’ who dominated the children's imaginations,” but a “misunderstood man who saves Scout’s and Jem’s lives” (Felty 298). As he becomes more humanized throughout the book, the reader is shown the more caring side to Boo, as Scout is learning this herself. Heck Tate protects Boo by making up the story that Bob Ewel fell on his knife. This way the people of Maycomb wouldn’t be coming to his door thanking him and telling him he is a hero. This might not seem like such a bad thing, but Boo is a very she person and doesn’t want all this attention drawn to him because in Maycomb, all the ladies would be coming to him, bringing cookies and other things