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Family In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird

730 Words3 Pages

Analytical Essay Family is important to you, right? Yes a lot of people would do anything to defend their family or stop someone that is slandering your family. The book To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee describes the Finch family who lives in Maycomb and Mr. Finch defends a black man named Tom Robinson. Chapter 9 describes the problem between Scout and Finch (Scout’s cousin) and Scout uses violence to defend her father. This problem really helps me come of age understanding it is not right to use violence when defending the family. You will have to pay the consequences. The author really used the conflict between Finch and Scout to see that many people use violence to stop people from insulting their family’s honor. In this passage, the …show more content…

Scout keeps hearing the town and her cousin Finch are insulting her father for being a “Negro-lover”. Her father is just defending the Negro named Tom Robinson. Scout is just having a hard time understanding why people are calling her father such derogatory names but her father finally explained why. This motif is used because Scout is defending her family’s honor and won’t let anyone be rude to her family. “You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me just hold your head high and keep those fists down. Try fighting with your head for a change.” In other words Atticus, Scout’s father is telling her not to worry or care what people think but to not use violence to fight back to use her head and ignore them to keep her head high. Scout learns that instead of making her life hard and hurtful listening to people insult her father, to just ignore the people’s opinion. The motif in the chapter it shows us that Scout doesn’t need her fists to defend her family. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee used conflict, character, and motif to convey the theme of people often defend their family’s honor, through violence. Scout learns that we don’t always have to use violence to fight for your family. Yes, we sometimes get tired and we lose control of ourselves, but let’s use our heads instead of our

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