Examples Of Foreshadowing In To Kill A Mockingbird

Benjamin Hudok

Honors English 10B

Vande-Guchte

5/15/23

To Kill a Mockingbird, Symbols of Foreshadowing essay

To Kill A Mockingbird is a story angled towards fueling the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Author, Harper Lee, loosely based her story off of the trial of the Scottsboro boys in the early 1930’s. The real life trial had depicted 2 white girls who accused 9 black boys of assaulting them, despite there being no evidence the 9 boys were sentenced to life in prison even after the girls had admitted the allegations were fake. She was inspired by her father’s writings in newspapers and time as a lawyer in Alabama because of the ideas he expressed in regards to the blatant racism in the Scottsboro Boys trial. It was this inspiration

Lee is referred to as Scout throughout the book with her father being depicted as a character by the name of Atticus Finch and her brother being Jem Finch. The interpretation of the trial itself is altered to be based around an African-American man named Tom Robinson, and the false allegations of him assaulting a white woman and his unlawful execution under incarceration. In her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee uses the symbolic significance of a Snowman, the Mad Dog, and a Mockingbird to foreshadow the events of an unjust trial in her novel.

Harper Lee incorporates the symbolic significance of a Snowman to illustrate the institutionalized racism in the Southern U.S and foreshadow the treatment of Tom Robinson throughout the book. The Snowman itself appears in the story as first constructed of dirt and then covered with snow. The snowman is described when the narrator

The Mockingbird is told in the story to be the one bird that has no wrongful intent and does nothing but sing for people. Singing in the distant background, It makes a physical appearance to foreshadow an attempt of a murder of Scout’s innocence. Atticus himself establishes the basis for the significance of the Mockingbird when he says “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people's gardens, they don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird”(Lee 119). This quote provides the symbolism of the Mockingbird as being innocence and innocent. Different characters in the story are deemed to be Mockingbirds as they had suffered despite their innocence. Brilliantly, the Mockingbird title is represented by a character’s name within the book, characters such as Atticus and Scout Finch as well as Tom Robinson have the names of birds within their names to symbolize that they are a Mockingbird. Harper Lee uses this idea of a character as a mockingbird to foreshadow that something will happen to kill them or their innocence. Later on in the book the death of a Mockingbird takes place. The death of Tom Robinson is revealed to the reader when a townsperson says “Tom’s dead…, They shot him,... He was running during