Who Is To Blame For Tom's Death Analysis

Harper Lee uses the perspectives different characters to show her own views about who is responsible for Tom’s death, as well as to portray the complexity of the blame in such a prejudice society. Tom represents many other African-Americans who, like Tom died for things they didn’t do, for reasons beyond their control. Through Scout, Jem and Atticus’ opinions about Tom’s death, Lee demonstrates how her opinion on who is to blame for the deaths, shifts and evolves over time.

Lee is very much like Scout in that she too grew up in a small town, with a lawyer for a father. Since both Lee and Scout grew up in around the same time period as well, Lee too would have had to struggle to understand and come to terms with the racial injustice happening

Like Lee’s father, Atticus is a well-respected lawyer who has intelligence as well as strong morals. Atticus is also the loving father of the narrator, Scout. Atticus’s beliefs are very influential to Scout and Jem just as Lee’s father 's views must have been very influential for her. Lee uses Atticus to demonstrate her own views in many ways, including her view on who is to blame for Tom’s death. Although Atticus’s speech to the jury at the end of the trial puts the blame into the hands of each individual juror, and although he is unable to understand how they could convict Tom, Atticus doesn’t ever blame them directly. Instead, Atticus blames something he doesn’t fully understand: “There is something in our world that makes men lose their heads---they couldn’t be fair if they tried” (295). Through Atticus, Lee’s blame of this societal plague is apparent. Lee, however, even as an adult, does not seem to exempt the Jury from as much of the blame as Atticus does, nor perhaps as much as she would like

On a simplistic level, the case is a man falsely accused of rape. This is young Scout’s perspective so she assigns the blame at the simplest level. She blames the Ewell’s whose lies would eventually cause Tom’s death. On a more in-depth level, the case is a man falsely accused of rape then convicted despite considerably more than reasonable doubt. This is teenage Jem’s perspective so he assigns the blame to two levels, the Ewells who falsely accused Tom and the jury which convicted Tom despite knowing he was most likely innocent. On the most in-depth level of the story, the case is a black man in a prejudiced society falsely accused of raping a white girl then convicted by a white jury despite more than reasonable doubt. This is adult Atticus’s perspective but instead of placing blame at all the levels, he assigns the blame mainly on one level, a level he can’t explain but that incorporates most of society, prejudice. To Lee, however, it is not just one case it is all the cases she has witnessed, heard about or read about and the ones she hasn’t. It is not just one family accusing or one jury convicting but the whole society whose prejudice, passed on for generations, has come between individuals and reason.

Lee grew from a young girl to a teenager to an adult in a very similar setting to Maycomb with many similar