To Kill A Mockingbird Memory Analysis

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She survived a horrific event. How much does she remember? In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist Scout Finch is recalling the events that led up to her brother, Jem Finch, breaking his arm; Scout’s memory is incredible because she can remember the smallest of details from her accounts as a child, which implies that her memory does not hinder the story. Scout Finch’s memory is amazing, this can be inferred from Harper Lee’s descriptive word choice. “I went to the backyard and found Jem plugging away at a tin can, which seemed stupid to me with all the blue jays around” (Lee 211). The author used vivid language to display Scout’s incredible memory. Words such as tin can and blue jay to exemplify this. “Atticus pushed …show more content…
In the next piece of evidence Scout, Jem, and their neighbor, Dill, visit the mysterious Radley house at night. “The back of the Radley house was less inviting than the front: a ramshackle porch ran the width of the house; there were two doors and two dark windows between the doors. Instead of a column, a rough two-by-four supported one end of the roof. An old Franklin stove sat in the corner of the porch; above it a hat-rack mirror caught the moon and shone eerily” (Lee 70) The author purposefully implanted these details into her novel to imply that the narrator remembers this night very well. “Then I saw the shadow. It was the shadow of a man with a hat on. At first I thought it was a tree, but the wind wasn’t blowing and tree-trunks never walked. The back porch was bathed in moonlight, and the shadow, crisp as toast, moved across the porch towards Jem” (Lee 71). Scout remembers it wasn’t just the shadow of a man, but it had a hat on. She can also recall what she took the mysterious shadow for. In summary, by analyzing Harper Lee’s descriptive word choice in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the narrator, Scout Finch, does not hinder the story that she is recalling from her childhood. One may observe this from chapters such as the Trial of Tom Robinson or the Radley Porch chapter. Memory can alter the way one tells a
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