Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird (TKAMB), describes her novel as, “a love story, plain and simple.” This statement shocked most readers, due to them misinterpreting one form of love with another. There are numerous meanings to the word love, the most common being, “an intense feeling of deep affection.” The novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, represents one specific type of love; agape, the fifth basic philosophy of nonviolence resistance. Agape is not a type of affectionate and romantic love, it is the spontaneous and unmotivated kind. Agape is the kind of love that influences us to help our neighbors or give back to our community. It is the kind of love that prevents us from hating our enemies or disrespecting another person. Maria Popova analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1958 essay in her paper, An Experiment In Love, and connects it to the basic philosophy of agape. To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the best novels of all time, is filled with examples of this unique type of unmotivated love throughout the story. …show more content…
Not only did Atticus Finch influence his children, he influenced the people around him and made the city of Maycomb a better place. Scout, at seven years old, knew more things about the world than people who are two times her age. Thanks to her great example, Atticus Finch, she was able to mature very quickly and have respect for every person she meets. Overall, the novel To Kill A Mockingbird provides many examples of the unmotivated love, agape, throughout the story. Not only did Harper Lee connect Atticus Finch’s character to the unmotivated love, agape, but she also connected the theme of her novel with agape as well. Lee did a great job with developing her characters to all be influenced by each other’s actions and giving readers an idea of what times were like in the South during the Great