Examples Of Irrationality In To Kill A Mockingbird

Irrationality and familiarity are sibling companions, feeding each other and oftentimes originating from the same source; although they are not generally believed to be inherently negative by most of society, they may keep beliefs of prejudice or religion when both may have been justified at the beginning of their existence, but serve no purpose in modern day life. In the historical fiction classic To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama, is fit to burst with ignorance, prejudice, and piety in the Depression era of America in the 1930s. The story revolves around a young girl and her brother as they grow up, initially viewing their hometown with the naivete of young children but slowly maturing as they see the

One of Lee’s main themes in this book is the irrationality but prevalence of prejudice. This is illustrated through the addition of the mad dog incident and the contemplative discussion of racial roots by Scout and Jem after the trial.

The mad dog incident was an incredibly profound yet subtle symbol of Harper Lee’s point about prejudice irrationality and prevalence. In Chapter Ten, an old dog is behaving strangely, and people in the neighborhood remark frighteningly that it is a “mad dog”. Scout shows her childish naivete in how she sees evil in general, thinking that “mad dogs foamed at the mouth, galloped, leaped and lunged at throats, and I thought they did it in August. Had Tim Johnson behaved thus, I would have been less frightened” (98). This symbolizes that evil is not always so obvious, and often acts strangely. Scout expected it to act crazily and violently; but violence is not the only product of evil. Perhaps even more powerful was when

This can be interpreted as an unfortunate symbol of the phrase “the bad apple ruins the whole bunch”, implying that the African gene is the dominant one, and a negative one at that, and the Caucasian gene is the recessive one. A parallelism to this attitude may also be reflected in how a virus or bacteria overpowers white blood cells in the body, or how carcinogens may cause malignant tumors that seem unassuming but are actually extremely harmful to the body as a whole. This is an irrational sentiment, because it is simply a different genetic trait that causes one’s skin to be a different color; yet, it is something to latch onto for those who a desperate to find inferiority. This racism originates from a rationality down to the colonial days centuries ago when the slave trade was initiated by the Dutch. Those in Africa had inferior resources to work off of, and thus had a less developed civilization, so the Europeans viewed them as savages; what immediately marked them off as different was their skin color, and henceforth, skin color was the immediate and easiest way to mark off where someone was on the social caste due to societal pressures or religious doctrine. This quote serves to illustrate how silly this prejudice is, as their ancestors lived so long ago. Alas, that is not how social hierarchy functions, and the three children are very