To Kill a Mockingbird Analysis

Lam Vu         

To Kill a Mockingbird Injustice

In To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee, the injustice in Maycomb is clearly conveyed through an innocent girl's point of view, Scout. Throughout the story, Scout gradually discovers how cruel adults can be and eventually, she changes her point of views about a lot of things. In particular, Harper Lee has succeeded in reflecting the dark side of the reality: Justice is not blind, it favors power. The motif of injustice has been mentioned as the story goes, starting with the Dolphus Raymond ad Boo Radley prejudice and tends to be more severe at the end with Tom Robinson’s case. The story also indicates racism and discrimination as Maycomb's weird diseases.

        Boo Radley is the first victim that was mentioned in the story. People gossip about him and describe him as if he is a monster, “he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained..” (16). People even blame him whenever there are some bad things happen in Maycomb, “..people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated...although the culprit was Crazy Addie…people still looked at the Radley place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions.” (10) No one in Maycomb knows Boo or has even seen him before but they just make unfair and bad images about him. Throughout the story, Boo Radley has to suffer all the rumors and prejudice that aim to him although he is totally innocent. Scout's point of view about him only changes at the end when Boo saves Jem and her lives. Besides, Harper Lee has done a good job using hyperbole to portray how terrible Boo is through adults’ words and how it affects the kids' perspective about Boo.

        The second victim of Maycomb's disease is a “drunkard”, Dolphus Raymond. He is a white man who married an African-American woman and always drinks from a paper bag. People think that he is drinking alcohol from the bag but it is actually just coke. Why do people assume that he is drinking alcohol? Because they see him holding a brown paper bag. No one in Maycomb would care what is really in the paper bag, the only thing they know is that he always holds his brown bag and it contains “alcohol”, that is it. The purpose behind this action of Mr.Raymond is ".. if ‘he' weave a little and drink out of this sack, folks can say Dolphus Raymond's in the clutches of whiskey—that's why he won't change his ways. He can't help himself, that's why he lives the way he does" (268) He believes that it is the only way that he can cope with everyone’s eyes when he stays with black people as he would like to. However, he does care about what people think about him, this is proven since he does not really drink alcohol as he seems like but substitute it with coke. In addition, the bottle of coke symbolizes biased judgement that people make through something's outlook as the assumption that they make about Mr.raymond when they see his brown bag.