Set in rural Alabama in the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee, focuses on the events experienced and seen through the eyes of a young girl growing up in Maycomb County, a seemingly sleepy town. Meanwhile, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian written by Sherman Alexie, concentrates on an adolescent boy’s experiences as a Native American living in a reservation during the early 2000s. Although the two award winning books seem to differ entirely with time period and personality of characters, it is apparent that these two books share similar concepts about community and how individualism impacts the whole.
The similar idea shared between the two books is first cultivated in To Kill a Mockingbird when the readers learn
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Atticus attempts to persuade the community to not defer to prejudice and intolerant ways by pointing out Bob Ewell’s flaws and racism. Although he knows that most of the individuals in Maycomb will believe that Negroes are the reason why everything is wrong, he wants the community to know that “‘... the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women- black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men’” (Lee …show more content…
Everyone is suffering from poverty and therefore dreams “about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams” (Alexie 11). Because of this, people turned to alcohol to cope with their situation. However, the dependence of alcohol goes to the point where individuals are killed because of it. For example, “Way drunk, Eugene was shot and killed by one of his good friends, Bobby, who was too drunk to even remember pulling the trigger… Eugene and Bobby fought over the last drink in a bottle of wine” (Alexie 165). In the end, this demonstrates the fact that too much hopelessness kills an