How Does Lee Use Characterization In To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill A mockingbird In the book To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Lee creates a theme that being scared of something can make us say or think of unnecessary thoughts about that object that brings fear to us. Lee shows us this theme through the element of dialog and characterization. We see this in many chapters for example chapter 1. We hear a lot about Boo and how he is a mean old person. Also in real life we hear about if someone has a fear of snakes that one person my talk about snakes like there slimy, disgusting, and they may say something that is unpleasant about snakes, but you get someone that thinks snakes are pleasent to have around, they may say that there patterns are very unique,or even that the snakes are very important.

In chapter 1 on page 14 Jem describes what Boo looks like. “Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half-feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained-if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off.”(14) Because of what all of Jems neighbors are telling him, Jem gets a fearful image of Boo, and Jem tells Dill about the Radley’s and says that ”...if Dill wanted to get himself killed, all he had to do was go up knock on the front door.”(14) Also the way the Radley’s house looks makes you and the characters get a horrific emotion about Boo. Lee uses words like “sharp”, “south”, darkened”, “rain-rotted”, “terrorized”, and “slate-gray”(9) to describe what the radley house looks like, but because of this image we get a fearful, unsoothing feeling that makes us tense up about the Radley

Later in the book we find out this fear that the reader, the town, and even Jem and Scout had about Boo was not what we all have imagined, we thought Boo was going to be some dark cave man guy but he turns out to be a very kind man that just wanted to play and enjoy life, but he was locked up in his own house for so many years. If we were to look at all of this from a different angle let’s say that the Radley house was pink with a lot of lovely, incredible flowers outlining the upright porch. Every day the sun would shine through the oak tree and hit the house at the perfect angle, and what if the book said the house seemed to be cozy and warm. Most of us would picture a peaceful man living life to the fullest. We can say because of the way the house was described to us in the book we get an anxious feeling about the people in the house, but our assumptions made about Boo and the Radley house was false. A second example of the theme Lee gives to us would be in chapters 28 when Jem and scout are getting older and they get getting assaulted by Bob Ewell. On page 299 Harper Lee uses the imagery “I could hear his breath coming easily beside me. Occasionally there was this sudden breeze that hit my bare legs, but it was all that