Ziad K. Abdelnour said, “Maturity comes with experience, not age.” This quote really hits home with how Harper Lee develops Scouts character. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee revealed the theme coming-of-age through one of the main characters, Scout. During the time of the novel, segregation and the Great Depression were going on simultaneously. As the days go by in the novel, Scout matures because of what she sees in her everyday life.
Scout finally realizes what Atticus told her a while back because she stood on Boo Radley’s porch and saw everything from his point of view. At the end of the novel, after the trial, Boo Radley stabbed and killed Bob Ewell because Mr. Ewell tried killing Jem and Scout. Mr. Ewell was trying to kill Jem and
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Atticus does not like the fact that they have air rifles, so he does not teach them how to shoot it. He tries to lay down the law and tell them to only shoot at tin cans, but he knows they will eventually shoot at birds, “‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. ‘Your father's right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, the only thing they do is sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird’” (Lee 74). Scout and Jem do not comprehend at first that Miss Maudie and Atticus were using that literally and metaphorically. Later on, throughout the novel, Jem and Scout had seen how it was used as a metaphor. They saw that Tom Robinson is a mockingbird because he was innocent and he got convicted of a crime that he did not do, that was the moment that Scout and Jem understood what Miss Maudie and Atticus were talking about. Scout finally could wrap her head around that quote once she matured and got