To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Read Nineteenth on September 1, 2012.

This is one of those books that I read before I started this challenge. I loved it when I read it as a sophomore in high school, and I still love it as a freshman in college. I actually failed most of the reading quizzes for the book, though, but that was because I read ahead and couldn't recall what happened in chapter eleven when I was on chapter fifteen. Forgive me for being an over-achiever for ONCE.

These past three years I haven't quite figured out why I liked it so much. I've read my share of racial-injustice books and they just haven't appealed to me at all. After reading it the second time, however, I've realized that To Kill a Mockingbird is not about racial injustice. It's about growing up, and if you've read my earlier posts, you know that that is what I like most about books. Scout grows up. Her paradigm shifts. The lessons she learns from her father conflict with the beliefs of the rest of the town, and she must decide who to trust. To Kill a Mockingbird is about going beyond commonplace and doing what is right; not doing what is acceptable to society, but to God.

I tried to speculate what exactly the title means. There is, of course, the obvious reference when Atticus tells Jem and Scout that to kill a mockingbird is a sin because they do nothing to harm people, such as eat crops like the other birds. They leave people alone, and harming such a thing is immoral. At first, I related this to the trial of Tom Robinson. Tom was a good-natured man who was framed for a crime he did not commit, yet he was convicted and sent to jail because he wasn't white. He did no harm, yet he was attacked. This can definitely fit the title's meaning. But at the end of the book, Scout again refers to the mockingbird lesson to Mr. Tate's refusal to admit that Boo had killed Bob Ewell. He said that if he told the town that Boo had committed the murder, then he would immediately receive an unwanted spotlight, not for being a criminal, but for doing the town a favor and for saving two children's lives. Giving Boo the attention was something he did not want, and giving it to him would be, as Scout observed, the same as killing a mockingbird. I felt that whichever instance the title referred to, it would obviously be the main point of the book. But neither Tom Robinson's court case or Boo Radley was the main focus of the novel. To Kill a Mockingbird refers to the main theme of the novel: the idea of justice; the idea that hurting an innocent being is inexcusable; the idea that people who do no harm, whether it be Tom or Boo, deserve freedom, whether it be equality in the judicial system or the choice to be left alone.

Okay, so not all American literature is bad. Just a vast majority of it.