Examples Of Foreshadowing In To Kill A Mockingbird

1548 Words7 Pages

Alana Haggar
Vande Guchte
Honors English
May 15th 2023

To Kill a Mockingbird

We all wonder what it was like to live in the past. The culture, the foods, the society, everything. The classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee is a perfect example of a way to look into the past and see what it was like from a first-person point of view. This novel shows what it was really like in the deep south of Maycomb Alabama, and takes place around the early 1930s, one of the most racist periods in history. This novel is from the point of view of our young Jean Louise (Scout) Finch, who lives with her older brother Jem and her father Atticus. Atticus, a strong-willed character with a good moral compass, is a lawyer, defending a black …show more content…

This is the story of how they risked their lives for civil justice. We can tell this before even finishing the book. Harper Lee uses foreshadowing in her novel very often to tell us what will happen in the future. She uses many symbols but the ones we will be talking about today will be, the snowman, the mad dog, and finally the white Camilla flower. These are crucial symbols to understand and fully appreciate this book. In her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee masterfully uses the symbolic significance of the snowman, the mad dog, and the white camilla flower to foreshadow events that occur later in the novel.
To begin, Harper Lee uses the snowman to foreshadow how an innocent black man’s story is covered up and forgotten. Excited, Scout and Jem see snow for the first time. They decide to build a snowman with all the snow they can find. Ms.Maudie, a nice lady that lives next …show more content…

At the beginning of the book, we see Jem as a cute 10-year-old boy playing with his sister in the warm summer months. We watch him grow older and realize more about the world, as well as how he should stand up for what he thinks is right. When Jem sees something he deems immoral or wrong he seeks to end or destroy it. We see this when Jem and Scout are walking past Mrs.Dubose’s house. Mrs.Dubose, a very mean, sick, and racist old woman, yells at the children every chance she gets. Jem and Scout were on their walk past Mrs.Dubose’s house when she thought she would say something very racist and offend Jem by attacking his father. She thought she would get away with it but Jem decided that was the last straw. We see how Jem reacts when he takes Scout's new baton and Scout narrates “He did not begin to calm down until he had cut the tops off every Camilla bush Mrs.Dubose owned,” (Lee 118). This is the first time Jem starts to show how he will stand up against racism. Jem's actions foreshadow how there will be more to come, likely where he will take more substantial risks. Harper Lee tries to start a progressing trend almost where Jem starts to do more dangerous things to stand up for others. She foreshadows how eventually Jem will get hurt because he is just a boy doing what he thinks is right. We see this when