To Kill a Mockingbird is a momentous novel by Harper Lee set in the 1930s. It is narrated by Scout Finch, a six-year-old who lives with her lawyer father Atticus and her ten-year-old brother Jem in a small town in Alabama called Maycomb. During the novel, Scout, Jem and their neighbour Dill try to have an encounter with their isolated neighbour Boo Radley, to see if the tales about him are true. Simultaneously, Atticus is assigned a case defending a black man that he is unlikely to win as most of the residents of Maycomb are racists. This is a tale of two misunderstood men related to the reader through the eyes of an innocent child. 

This story is loosely based on Lee’s observation of her surroundings, it is safe to say her writing was ahead of her time. It was Lee’s command over prose that her writing has had an influence over the decades. 

No one is born a racist. Racism and hate are taught. To Kill a Mocking Bird, while playing its role as a literary masterpiece, also advocates this very notion. Harper Lee, in her writing, very skilfully creates a contrast between the innocence of children, Scout and Jem in this case, and how they perceive and comprehend real-world matters when faced with them. Atticus, the father and the lawyer defending a falsely accused black man, explains to his children the realities of their time and differentiates between right and wrong to them through logic. Harper Lee in this sensational prose explores, through the young eyes of Jem and Scout, the irrationality of adults with the help of light-hearted humour. Those who were categorized as ‘irrational adults’ then are now called racist.  

Harper uses Boo Radley for essentially two reasons. Firstly, she wants the reader to realise the innocence of the kids who are afraid of a society’s constructed impression of the monster living in the run down Radley house. He was not a disruptive member of the Maycomb’s community; he was only thought of as one. Secondly, she wanted the reader to realise that Arthur (Boo) Radley was someone no one knew personally and so their impression of him was based on tales they had heard and not seen, and just like that he was a reject in the society. He was the mocking bird.

Harper simultaneously talks about Tom Robinson, a black man who was accused and then charged with the rape of a white girl. There were no witnesses to the crime but due to the irrationality of the adults, it was presumed that because he is black, it is likely that he committed the crime. This too was a product of the societal construct and expectation of a black man. The details of the case are mentioned in the novel and all of them point in the favour of Tom’s case but racism is ignorant. He too was a mocking bird.

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

The title of the book To Kill a Mockingbird represents the innocence that is lost as the evil realities of our world unravel. 

This book is one that went down in history and rightfully so. I thank Harper Lee for giving me Atticus. He was not a sheep and did not fall in line with whatever the majority deemed as the right; rather questioned the norms and appealed to logic to declare his own right and wrong and taught his children to do the same.

By Maheen Elahi