Theme Of Courage In To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, tells the coming-of-age story of Jean (Scout) Louise Finch and her brother in Maycomb, Alabama during the early years of the Great Depression. Lee’s monumental story includes themes ranging from racial discrimination to the importance of parental figures. The 1960 publication is not unlike those we have read this year, including Through the Tunnel, Initiation, The Odyssey, and Romeo and Juliet in several aspects. To Kill a Mockingbird has a significant connection between these aforementioned stories in their themes and symbols.

To Kill a Mockingbird’s theme of unrelenting courage is also shown in Homer’s The Odyssey. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout’s father, Atticus, is a criminal

The main character in this novel is a child, and the many years that pass within it add to Scout and Jem’s years of experience of the world. Being children, they often engage in childish activities and believe folktales meant to entertain their vigorous imaginations. The folktale of Hot Steams, as described in chapter four by Jem, are hot spots on dark roads where spirits that can not get to heaven roam. In order to pass one without becoming one when you die, “you say, ‘Angel bright, life-in-death; get off the road, don’t suck my breath.’ That keeps ‘em from wrapping around you-” (Lee, 41). This folktale briefly terrifies the kids before they get distracted with other means of spending their summer. Later in the story, when the trial of Tom reaches its final verdict and the children have seen and heard countless prejudices committed in their town, Jem reminds Scout of Hot Steams while walking to the school pageant. They laugh at the drifting memory: “We laughed. Hainst, Hot Steams, incantations, secret signs, had vanished with our years as mist with sunshine” (Lee, 292). The children, not many years older than when they first spoke of the outlandish tale, scoff at the infantile belief that they now see for what it is: false. The years that have passed, while not many, helped shape the children’s mounting perspective of the

The act of defeating over a hundred suitors in order to take back his rightful place seems overwhelmingly impossible, yet Odysseus's home in Ithaca is so important to him that he pursues and accomplishes the task with the help of his son. Before he slays them, he tells them: “Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my women servants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die” (Homer). Ithaca, Odysseus’s home, is so important to him that he journeys the Mediterranean for ten years and kills over a hundred men in pursuit of