Towards the beginning of the book, Atticus tells Scout that she should try to put herself into someone else’s shoes and walk around in them. Scout tries to throughout the book, and finally, at the end, she gets it. This is how I perceive some of what happened. Scout tries several times throughout the book to do what Atticus told her to do, and has a few great successes, but her greatest success was at the end of the book where she walks Boo Radley back to his house after he saved Scout’s and Jem’s lives. She stood on their porch and imagined what it must have been like to be Boo, watching her and Jem playing, and growing up. She imagines him seeing “his kids” in danger, and goes to rescue them from Mr. Ewell. She sees how much Boo cares for …show more content…
Compassion is founded on sympathy. Sympathy is walking around in someone else’s shoes and understanding why they did something. To have sympathy, you have to accept that reasoning even if you don’t agree with it. Sympathy would have helped Scout in many of the situations she had been in over the course of the book, but she finally got it in the last chapter. It could have helped her with not judging Mrs. Dubose for saying those mean things about Atticus. Had she known when Mrs. Dubose was still alive that she was addicted to morphine, I think Scout would have been nicer. It could have helped her with the Cecil Jacobs incident, the Francis incident, as well as all those times with Aunt Alexandra. In those cases, if Scout had known, or chosen to know and recognize, where they came from, she likely would not have been so quick to judge. She didn’t know where they came from. It was wrong of Cecil and Francis to say the things they did. They probably didn’t know what the words they were saying meant, and were just repeating what they’d heard from their …show more content…
She wants to teach them how to be a lady and gentlemen, respectively, but she isn’t doing it in the best way possible, I don’t think. From where she’s come from, the Finches are a great family, with a good line going back many generations, and she thinks it would be a tragedy to have another break in the line after Cousin Joshua, and a few other people. They are a powerful family, and with great power comes great responsibility(Winston Churchill, FDR, TR, Lord Melbourne, Spider-Man). A few examples of when Scout looked through another person’s eyes were when Miss Maudie’s house burned down. Jem and Scout asked her if she was grieving about her house, and were shocked when she wasn’t. It seems as if they were thinking about how they would feel if their house had been the one that burned down. Another instance where Scout could have used sympathy was the first day of school with Miss Caroline, the time Atticus had suggested she use it with. It would have improved her relationship with Miss Caroline, and she probably would have had a better school experience that year. Also, she likely would have gotten into less trouble for having the mouth she had. It would have improved a lot of things in that