To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Sample

Analyze The Childhood World Of Jem, Scout, And Dill And Their Relationship With Boo Radley In Part One

In 1960 an American writer, Harper Lee, has published a novel which became immediately popular and successful. To Kill a Mocking Bird is named classic of modern American literature (Milton, 1984). The plot and the characters are based on observations of the author’s surrounding: family, relatives, neighbors and an event that had happened near her hometown when Harper was 10 years old. The story is divided into two parts which depict the children’s world and jarring of adults and infant’s worlds.

The main story takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the years of Great Depression. The narrator is a little girl, Scout Finch (6 years-old), who lives with her brother Jem and father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. Jem and Scout have their best friend named Dill, who stays at his aunt for summer. All of them have to live through the time when Finch’s Family is condemned for Atticus defense of a black man who was falsely accused of raping a white girl. In that novel the cruel and unjust world of adults interweaves with the innocent, fantastic and naive world of children. They learn the lessons of grownups’ world through the whole story, but stand that lesson with dignity. The innocent children had to grow up into adult world with a number of negative elements.

 Analyzing the first part of the novel, a great attention should be payed to the childhood world of Jem, Scout and Dill and especially to their relationship with Boo Radley.

Scout and Jem where raised up by Atticus. They found their father satisfactory: he played with them, read to them, and treated them with courteous detachment (Lee, p.3). Their mother died when Jem was 6 and Scout two years old. Scout did not miss her, Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sign at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house (Lee, p.3). Though, their cook Calpurnia was the closest thing to a mother that Atticus’ children had. She taught them everything she could and was a good, but strict friend. Scout and Jem were almost the only children in their street. They had no other problems as to do their home duties and study. Every day they had to dill with adults – stern and friendly at the same time– that taught them manners, rules of behavior and gave them valuable life lessons. That’s the reason why To Kill a Mocking Bird is also treated as a pedagogical novel (Heath, 2007).

Dill, a boy-neighbor, was from Meridian, Mississippi. He was spending the summer with his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb (Lee, p.4). He didn’t know his biological father, was raised up with his mother and relatives. He usually pretended to be someone he wasn’t. During the whole story he lied a lot about his family, adventures and life. Dill’s great imagination helped him. He did it not just for fun. Unlike Atticus’ children, Dill lacked the security of family life. He felt replaced by stepfather, unloved and not wanted by his parents (Lee, p. 76). Dill hasn’t got a home, just passed around from relative to relative (Lee, p. 44-45). His childhood is not a happy one unlike Jem and Scout’s, but his impassioned imagination helped him to over go the troubles, made him forget all bad things in his life. His head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies (Lee, p.4).

All the free summer time children, Dill, Jem and Scout, spent on games and role-plays. Here their imagination had no borders. But they got tired of those entertainments too soon. They paid attention to town’s myth about Boo Radley, who was nearly thirty-three years old when the events of the story took place (Lee, p.6). No one knew what exactly had happened to him and why no one saw him for a very long time. The legend has it that as a young man Arthur “Boo” Radley had some not serious problems with law and his father, a very severe man, took care of him to make no further trouble, instead of attending the industrial school (Lee, p. 5-6). It seemed to be not just arrest to the room, but a complete isolation of Arthur from the world. The Radleys were reserved even before, but after the incident their family was extolled with mystery, gossips and guesses. Town’s gossips fable that each night Boo Radley had a walk and looked into neighbors windows, ran wild and got mad, was a great ground for children to use their imagination and to create Boo Radleys’ portrait: a horrible man who stabs people with scissors, eat animals. Their innocent attitude to the world played a bad joke – they trusted their imagination not facts.  Arthur started as a mystery guy, but then a unique relationship connected all of them. That connection was started by Dill’s try to get Boo out of the house, his idea of role-play Boo’s life. Arthur looked after the children in his own way to be sure they were safe from any harm. His little presents, the thing that he mended Jem’s trousers and warmed Scout’s shoulders during the night fire (the actual facts and actions), made children understand he wasn’t a person to be afraid of (Heath, 2007).

The innocent world of childhood represented in the novel To Kill a Mocking Bird had to deal with a great number of grownups world’s elements. So, it changed, affected the relationships between people, especially with Boo.  It doesn’t matter was your childhood happy or not, you need a good friend, real or mysterious, to overcome your problems together whatever they are. The children found a person to be interested in, to be afraid of and to make friends with in spite of the fact that they were so different and sometimes scared. They changed their attitude to many things each day they grew up and lost their illusions about the world around learning the facts not myths.


Lee H., To Kill a Mocking Bird, the 40-th anniversary edition
Milton J., Lee H. (1984), Barron’s Educational Series, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, p. 3-4
Heath S. (2007), iUniverse, To Kill A Mockingbird: A Critique on Behalf of Children, p. 1-5″

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