To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee: Rhetorical Analysis

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee denounces the social issues that arise as a result of general (and at times, blissful) ignorance. The audience is presented with the progressive and dynamic development of one Jean Louise Finch (or “Scout”) through her own eyes. Within her own naive innocence lies blissful ignorance; a filter through which all her thoughts and actions are passed. Lee enlightens her audience about the consistently underestimated value of pervasive ignorance in children whose own pure paradigms would make for an ideal, equitable world and the shroud of injustice in the real, mature world that needlessly contradicts their unadulterated mindset. Ignorance is the subconscious subversion of demographic demarcation. Jem, untainted and juvenile in his views, states that he believes “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” (Lee 304). In so doing, he (ignorantly) refuses to conform to the conventional partiality of racism, sexism, and general inequity present in their world as well as ours. Consider how different our society

Unlike Jem, she is not nearly as impervious to prevalent biases present in her community. They constantly interfere with her thoughts on her peers and it shows. When Walter Cunningham, a classmate of Scout’s from a less wealthy (and less privileged, one might argue) family joins them for dinner, she gives no thought to Walter’s value and deduces it as close to none, insisting that “He ain’t company, Cal, he’s just a Cunningham” (Lee 33), no doubt as a result of uneducated surrounding authority figures, such as the undeniably ignorant Miss Caroline. Furthermore, Scout quickly succumbed to the primitive fables behind Boo Radley. Her point of view, which is of the likes that “Boo Radley drove the scissors into his parent’s leg” (Lee 13), has been distorted by rumors of the Radley family borne of nothing more than childish boredom and the lack of palpable