To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee :: To Kill a Mockingbird Essays

Analysis of Major Characters Scout - Scout is a very unusual little girl, both in her own qualities and in her kind position. She is unmistakably intelligent (she learns to read before beginning school), unusually confident (she fights boys without fear), unusually thoughtful (she worries about the essential goodness and diabolic of mankind), and unusually good (she always acts with the best intentions). In terms of her social identity, she is unusual for being a tomboy in the prim and congruous Southern world of Maycomb.One quickly realizes when reading To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout is who she is because of the way Atticus has raised her. He has nurtured her mind, conscience, and individualism without bogging her down in fussy social hypocrisies and notions of propriety. While most girls in Scouts position would be wearing dresses and learning manners, Scout, thanks to Atticuss hands-off parenting style, wears overalls and learns to move up trees with Jem and Dill. She doe s not always grasp social niceties (she tells her teacher that one of her checkmate students is too poor to pay her back for lunch), and human behavior oft baffles her (as when one of her teachers criticizes Hitlers loss against Jews while indulging in her own prejudice against blacks), but Atticuss protection of Scout from hypocrisy and social pressure has rendered her open, forthright, and thoroughly meaning.At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no accept with the evils of the world. As the novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form of racial prejudice, and the basic development of her character is governed by the interrogative sentence of whether she go away emerge from that contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. give thanks to Atticuss wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has a great capacity f or evil, it to a fault has a great capacity for good, and that the evil can often be mitigated if one approaches others with an outlook of sympathy and understanding. Scouts development into a someone capable of assuming that outlook marks the culmination of the novel and indicates that, whatsoever evil she encounters, she will retain her conscience without becoming cynical or jaded. Though she is still a child at the end of the book, Scouts horizon on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a near grown-up.