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Examples Of Courage In To Kill A Mockingbird

869 Words4 Pages

Emma Kluth
Mr. Nikolai Ellison
English 9 Honors
21 April 2023
The Forms Of Courage
To Kill A Mockingbird written by Harper Lee provides readers with many life lessons through the life of Scout Finch; one of these numerous lessons is courage. Courage overall is defined as “strength in the face of pain and grief”, although this anonymous strength can be exhibited in different forms. For example, a picture of courage for one person could be standing up for themselves; however, for another person, it could be asking a teacher a question. Nevertheless, for every attribute, characteristic, and feature of a person, there are multiple different ways it can be displayed. Therefore, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird shows that courage takes different …show more content…

Dubose is an elderly lady who lived on the same street as the Finch family and had a severe morphine addiction. Throughout Mrs. Dubose's battle, she illustrates courage by wanting to find a solution to her dependence on morphine. Atticus states, “According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.” (Lee 128). Even after her death, Mrs. Dubose was recognized as courageous by Atticus. Also, Atticus tells Jem that she died free “as the mountain air” indicating that she had found her conscience and independence without drugs. Along with wanting to fight her addiction, she unknowingly set an example to the Finch kids of what courage can look like. He explained, “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.” (Lee 128). At first, Jem and Scout did not understand what lesson Atticus was attempting to teach them by reading to Mrs. Dubose. However, when they realized this, they acknowledged what they were doing was not a punishment, but a favor for a feeble …show more content…

Dubose due to his situation. During the trial, he can show courage by being fearless and telling the jury everything. The author informs us“he had been in trouble with the law before: he once received thirty days for disorderly conduct…What did it consist of? Got in a fight with another man, he tried to cut me.” (Lee 216). Telling the jury he had been in jail before could've immediately been a reason for them to find him guilty. Although, he stayed true to himself and displayed strength in the presence of failure throughout the entire trial. Along with showing courage in telling the truth, he also displays boldness by standing strong in the front of the courtroom despite his race. He knew that “Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts, Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.” (Lee 244). Tom knew he had no chance of winning over a white woman. Therefore, he understood that the best thing he could do is stay composed and show a silent form of courage. While Mrs. Dubose showed courage through battle, Tom displayed the same element in doing what was best to save his life:

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Bravery can be demonstrated in many ways. The most common way we see it today is in movies or books by a hero facing a villain who is much more powerful than themselves. However, bravery can be much more. It can be killing a spider despite having an extreme fear of the insect or speaking your mind knowing there will be backlash. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Mrs. Dubose demonstrates an entirely different kind of bravery, and one which may be the bravest of all, she stands up to pain in the face of death in order to be a better person.

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but you begin anyway and you see through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” (Lee page 149) Atticus explains Mrs. Dubose’s battle with addiction and teaches them what real courage is.

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but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. ”(Lee 112). This quote shows Mrs. Dubose is actually a very courageous woman because she knows her time is running out but she keeps fighting.

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Dubose and her morphine addiction. Mrs. Dubose had been fighting a terrible disease for most of her life that caused her great pain. Morphine was the only way they knew to ease the pain, but morphine is highly addictive and Mrs. Dubose didn’t want to die an addict. For a while before her death she tried her absolute hardest to become addiction-free and she did free from her addiction, and died in pain. This is one of the smaller examples of courage in the book, but it still serves a very good lesson in courage.

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It takes a lot of courage to quit an addiction. Mrs. Dubose shows courage by trying to stop her addiction. Doing this goes against an addicted individual's urges and requires a lot of self-will and courage. In the book Atticus says to Jem “She said she meant to break herself of it before she died” on page 148. The author shows how Mrs. Dubose’s acts of courage in trying to quit her addiction, turns into her developing integrity.

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Dubose’s unseen patience in fighting morphine addiction and her astonishing strength in extending time between doses of morphine, Lee uses Mrs. Dubose’s true intentions to show things are not always as they seem as the theme of the novel. “‘Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict,’ said Atticus. ‘She took it as a pain-killer for years’” (Lee 147). Atticus explains to his children that Mrs. Dubose used to yell at them because she was fighting morphine addiction and needed some way to get her anger out.

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Mrs. Dubose is a character in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, that exhibits traits and behaviors similar to those expressed in the poem “Be Brave!” by Bree Hodges. She specifically shares similarities with a small excerpt of the poem in which it says, “courage to know when a battle is lost” (Hodges). This pertains to Mrs. Dubose regarding a crippling morphine addiction that she battles up until her death.

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but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do” (149). Atticus saw the courage that Mrs. Dubose had because she kept fighting until her final breath. She was the kind of person who

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You rarely win, but sometimes you do”(Lee 149). 4. Mrs. Dubose wanted to kick her addiction in her dying days and she accomplished that. She pushed through the agony of withdrawal and in her dying moments was free. Even Atticus, a person who is very courageous, says that Mrs. Dubose is the most courageous person he’d ever met.

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Jem had the conception that courage was a “manly man”, a man that was tough and could fight. However, using Ms. Dubose as an example, she explained a new type of courage to Jem. Ms. Dubose knew that her struggle was close to impossible to win, as many people failed to break addictions, yet she still tried to fight it, and winning at the end. The courage to do so was considered, by Atticus, real courage. This was also demonstrated by Liu Xiaobo.

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How she is courageous is that even though she was a morphine addict, she wanted to get clean. Atticus says “she was the bravest person I ever knew”(Lee 149). To Atticus she was the bravest even after she says all of those horrible things about him. Mrs.Dubose knew it was hard and that she would go through all of those fits to be free. Another way Mrs.Dubose is courageous is “I wanted you to see what real courage is ...see it through no matter what”(Lee 149).

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Dubose was in the presence of mental courage. She stopped taking her pain killers because she did not want to die addicted. Later in the book, Scout asks Atticus why he is defending Tom Robinson and Atticus says, “Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine, I guess” (101). What one can learn from this quotation is that the theme of mental courage is present in Atticus as he takes on Tom Robinson’s case, by risking the opinions of others about him and if he will win or not.

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Atticus shows his respect for Mrs. Dubose saying “You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew” (112). Mrs. Dubose knew that getting rid of her morphine addiction would be a difficult task.

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Harper Lee wants to tell us that it takes courage NOT to kill a mockingbird Courage and the symbol of the mockingbird are two of the most important, or in fact in my opinion the most important themes, which are addressed and displayed in the highly praised, but also controversial novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” written by Harper Lee. I will try to interpret these two motives and show how they are strongly connected to each other. There are many different types of courage and many people who all show it in their own personal way. If people talk about bravery and courage, they mostly think of the physical kind of courage. But there are also other kinds, which are often forgotten or cast aside by their big brother: moral and emotional courage.

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Henry Lafayette Dubose is that she is a force not to be reckoned with. According to Atticus Finch, Mrs. Dubose is the true definition of real courage, and he makes Jem read to her. Scout strongly disagrees with his perspective. She believes that the aging woman’s sole purpose on earth is to ridicule and criticize every detail of anyone who enters her line of vision with comments such as : “ ‘ What are you doing in those overalls? You should be in a dress and camisole young lady!

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