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Examples Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Empathy cannot be grasped, but is always there for people who can, “climb into people’s skin and walk around,”(39) as constantly repeated by Atticus Finch, throughout Harper Lee’s novel.“To Kill a Mockingbird” distinctly depicts empathy through Scout and Jem, as they learn to step into people’s skin and perceive their predicament. Russell Freedman in his nonfictional passage, “Freedom Walkers” directly shows how people were affected negatively by racism and how that was unacceptable. However, he does not give readers a thorough understanding of empathy, as it is ineffective to spark action to readers in comparison to the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In both stories, people are persecuted by others for their race or on premature biases. …show more content…

To Kill a Mockingbird better incorporates empathy than Freedom Walkers by creating a powerful relationship between the reader and the characters throughout the plot.

PERSON perspective: To Kill a Mockingbird has a first person narrative, generating the feeling that you are involved, which expresses the emotions of the characters much more strongly.The novel being a first person narrative, readers feel and see what Scout, the main character, feels. “We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”(373) Scout sees how unjust it was what people had done to Tom Robinson and Boo, and through the course of the novel, feels compassion for them. With a first person point of view, when Jem and Scout start to see the unfairness of the trial or other occurrences and take it emotionally hard, the readers can relate because of the strong connection Lee makes with the characters during this book. “It was Jem’s turn to cry. His face was streaked …show more content…

From the very beginning of the narrative, Lee uses descriptive words to describe every minor detail. “Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square.”(6) By using detailed commentary, Lee makes a story much more intense. By illustrating events to make it more dramatic, events like Atticus being cornered or Tom’s arrest experience, can be portrayed as more saddening than it may of really been. When Lee evokes empathy, the detailed descriptions make the story much more dramatic raising the amount of empathy readers feel because the occurrence sounds much more sorrowful. Freedom Walkers does not contain these descriptions making the incident seem less notable compared to To Kill a Mockingbird. Although both narratives share the plot of two incidents of an black individual being persecuted unfairly, Lee’s description better executed in making the reader feel empathetic towards the

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