Humans are creatures of emotion, guided by their will and blessed with the capacity to have compassion. Their ability to understand others and share their pain, be flawed with vulnerability, and still choose to keep others close to them— these abilities, unique to us, are what have led the world to where it is today. Their fragility is what connects them, and yet it is a human’s greatest weakness. Harper Lee’s prestigious novel To Kill A Mockingbird, based in the 1930s, displays the shortcomings of society and how they have fed into their faults. Biased perceptions of others based on nothing had plagued their ability to see each other as humans and led to the persecuted Tom Robinson having the value of his life unfairly questioned. The world …show more content…
In To Kill a Mockingbird, lawyer and father Atticus Finch is a bright example of what human empathy can achieve, when he risked his reputation and career to defend the falsely accused Tom Robinson. He argues several powerful points in his closing statements: “You know the truth, and 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 not to any particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and no man is living who has never looked upon a woman without desire'” (Lee 204). Atticus is a representation of the growth that society has made and how much deeper our understanding of each other has become. However, the great amount of prejudice overwhelms those who are moral. The severity of this problem cannot be overlooked, whether progress is being made or not. The beginning of Atticus’s entire case and the harassment of Tom Robinson was based purely on prejudice: “The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took