Examples Of Foreshadowing In To Kill A Mockingbird

(Hook). Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, follows the lives of Scout, Jem, and Atticus Finch in Maycomb, southern Alabama, during the Great Depression. Risking his reputation, family, and life, Atticus, Jem and Scout's father, defends a black man named Tom Robinson, in one of the biggest trials of Maycomb. In To Kill a Mockingbird there are many instances of foreshadowing throughout the book. Foreshadowing is used to provide clues to the reader about how events will play out in the future of how characters will develop. In her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee skillfully uses snow, a white camellia, and a mockingbird as symbols to foreshadow events and people that occur later in the book. To begin, Lee uses the snow blanketing

Dubose as a symbol to foreshadow Jem rejecting white supremacy. In chapter eleven Jem is gifted a box of white camellias after Mrs. Dubose’s death. She gave the flowers to him because Jem helped Mrs. Dubose battle her morphine addiction by reading to her after school in her final days. When Jem receives the flowers Scout describes, “Jem opened the box. Inside, surrounded by wads of damp cotton, was a white, waxy, perfect camellia. It was a snow-on-the-mountain…Jem screamed, flinging it down” (Lee 128). When Scout depicts, white, waxy, perfect camellia it shows how the flower symbolizes the white supremacist warped lense of Maycomb, that the white people of their town are untainted, pure, perfect. Jem screamed, flinging it down directly symbolizing his refusal of white supremacy from the people of Maycomb. Later in the book, Tom Robinson’s trial plays out as the finches hoped it wouldn't. The heavy biased and racism in Maycomb wins, and Tom is convicted guilty. When the Finches are leaving the courthouse, Jem says, “It ain’t right Atticus…How could they do it, How could they?” (Lee 242-243). This displays Jem's rejecting to follow along with the rest of the town's white supremacist ideals after hearing the verdict. Jem throws away the pure white, waxy verdict that most of the people of Maycomb happily

In chapter ten of To Kill a Mockingbird Jem and Scout get shotguns from Atticus for Christmas. Upon this gift, Atticus wouldn't teach the kids to shoot but he did give one piece of wisdom to them, Atticus warns the kids, “...remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird” (Lee 103). This is the first direct connection the reader gets to the title, To Kill a Mockingbird. This connection foreshadows that a character symbolizing a mockingbird will be killed. Later Scout asks Mrs. Maudie, the Finch's next-door neighbor, about what Atticus said and she explains, “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us” (Lee 103). This means mockingbirds directly symbolize innocents, when Mrs. Maudie says they don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs she means they don't do anything wrong. So it would be a sin to kill something or someone that is innocent. Later in the book after Tom Robinson is found guilty even though Atticus proves his innocence beyond responsible doubt and it is shown to the courtroom that Bob Ewell is the true perpetrator. Tom is sent to Enfeild Prison Farm 70 miles from Chester county and after a short while of being there something happens to him. Atticus discloses, “Tom's dead. They shot…seventeen bullet