To Kill a Mockingbird and Brother Jeremy Atticus Essay

Submitted By heyymelinda
Words: 1089
Pages: 5
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Melinda Than
11/16/12
Period 4
Justice and Judgments
In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee tells about a story of a knowledgeable young girl, Jean Louise ‘’Scout” Finch; the story unravels to focus on Scout, her older brother Jeremy Atticus “Jem” Finch, and their friend Dill on their journey to understanding more about life in the 1930s in Alabama. Jem and Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, guides them in the right path regarding the cynical truth about racism as he serves as a great role model for his kids. Atticus remains as a respected lawyer in Maycomb County when he takes on a controversial case about an innocent black man named Tom Robinson against two untrustworthy white people. Through these occurrences, Scout and Jem lose their innocence in order to learn that there needs to be an existent of good to balance evil. Through judgments about Boo Radley, Aunt Alexandra, and Tom Robinson, Lee emphasizes the idea of justice depends on society’s majority view of morality.
The morally constricted town of Maycomb loses the correct moral decision because of their blinded eye with bigotry. Boo Radley lives as an innocent white man in the neighborhood, but he unfortunately centers on the false indictment against him; “although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker’s Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions” (9). Though this may seem like a simple lack of miscommunication between neighbors, it point out how selfish and ignorant of these narrow minded citizens, to point their fingers at someone whom they ultimately never even share
Than 2 knowledge of for continuous years. In reality, “Boo doesn’t mean anybody harm” (254), and in fact “every move he made was uncertain” with “an expression of timid curiosity” (277) in his eyes. Boo Radley’s character defends his innocent heart that implies his weak understanding about prejudice, which shows that he bear no such sense of harm. Being a man with a “voice of a child afraid of the dark” that Boo Radley turns out to be, one would be surprised to how much courage it took in him at the moment when he rescued Jem and Scout. He lives as a human being, and therefore, needs to be treated like one; unfortunately, he doesn’t possess the social power for the same ‘justice’ as others did. Because of Aunt Alexandra’s, Atticus’s sister, “perfect Southern” woman character, she proceeds to maintain that idea of a woman to Scout, and allows her general assumptions about blacks and white ‘trash’ to identify her as a racist individual. Although Aunt Alexandra realizes her presumptuous view on ones that she misperceived of, lies on the wrong path morally, it does not excuse her actions due to the fact that a grown woman should act as an epitome of goodness and kind acts. During her stay at Atticus’s, she irrationally argues with Atticus, “You’ve got to face it sooner or later and it might as well be tonight. We don’t need [Calpurnia] now” (137). When Aunt Alexandra discovers that Calpurnia allows the kids to accompany her to the black church, she attains this information to persuade Atticus that Calpurnia does not embody a role model. It seems absolutely aloof and arrogant of her to accuse wrongly of a kind person who remains a responsible guardian for the kids in place of their mother for countless of years with the Atticus’s trust. As Scout began to differentiate between whites and white trash, again Aunt Alexandra let her racist roots shown by elucidating the distinction of Jem and Walter Cunningham, as she unpleasantly explains, “The thing is, you can scrub Walter Cunningham till
Than 3 he shines, you can put him in shoes and a new suit, but he’ll never be like Jem,” (224). Aunt Alexandra shallowly claims her opinion as truth to Scout without a true reason for disliking them. “She took off her glasses and stared at me. “I’ll tell you why,” she said, “Because-he-is-trash.” (225) Aunt Alexandra
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