TKAM Flashcards
Scout
Louise Finch (Scout) – The narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird,
Scout is Atticus’s daughter, Jem’s sister, Alexandra
and Jack’s niece, and friends with Dill. In the three years the
novel covers, she grows from six-years-old to nine. Scout is
intelligent and loves to read, but is also headstrong, outspoken,
and a tomboy. As the novel opens, Scout is both innocent and
intolerant of anything new or different. Scout’s innocence falls
away in part because she is growing up and in part from the
trial of Tom Robinson: she discovers how cruel and violent
people can be. But she also learns, through Atticus’s careful
teaching, that the necessary response to intolerance is to try
to understand its origins, to relate to people in terms of their
dignity rather than their anger, and to use that foundation as a
way to try to slowly change their minds.
Jem
Scout‘s older brother and Atticus’s
son. Jem is four years older than Scout, and therefore
understands many of the events in Maycomb in a way that the
younger Scout can’t. Intelligent and adventurous as a child,
Jem never loses these qualities but also grows into a young
man who is strong, serious, idealistic, and sensitive. While both
Scout and Jem love Atticus, Jem also reveres the justice and
moral character that Atticus stands for, and which he wants to
one day stand for himself.
Atticus
Scout and Jem‘s widowed father, and Alexandra
and Jack’s brother. He employs Calpurnia, but thinks
of her as family. A distinguished lawyer in Maycomb, Atticus
believes in moral integrity, and stands up against the racism
of Maycomb to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely
accused of rape by a white man, Bob Ewell. Yet as much
as Atticus believes in acting morally, he does not believe in
righteously condemning those who don’t always act morally.
Instead, Atticus teaches his children to search out and respect
the dignity of every human being, to try to see the world from
their individual point of view. Atticus Finch has become one of
the great father figures in American literature.
Boo
A recluse who never sets foot
outside his house, Arthur is an object of fascination for many
Maycomb residents. Many rumors describe Arthur as a kind of
monster who stabbed his father as a boy, eats cats, and haunts
the neighborhood at night. He turns out to be innocent, gentle,
kind, protective of children, intensely shy, and one of the mockingbirds
to which the title of To Kill a Mockingbird refers
Calpurnia
The Finches’ black cook, she essentially raised
Scout and Jem. Atticus considers her family. Calpurnia is
strict but loving. As a child, Scout resents Calpurnia’s rules
and restrictions, but as she grows she comes to recognize and
respect Calpurnia for her strength, intelligence, and kindness.
Dill
Jem and Scout‘s friend, who
visits Maycomb each summer from his home in Meridian,
Alabama. Miss Rachel Haverford is his aunt. Dill is an intensely
imaginative and sensitive boy who uses his imagination to
hide loneliness and pain: though his mother is divorced, he
constantly makes up stories about the greatness of the father
he barely knows. Dill is obsessed with Boo Radl
Tom Robinson
A black man accused of rape by Bob Ewell,
and defended by Atticus. Tom is a family man, father, and
churchgoer. He does not have the use of his left arm.
Bob ewell
Mayella’s father and the patriarch of the poor,
vicious Ewell clan who live in an old cabin near the town dump.
Ewell is thoroughly awful, a man who buys alcohol while letting
his children go hungry.
HEck Tate
The sheriff of Maycomb.
Dolphus
A wealthy white man who lives
outside town with his black mistress and interracial children
Link DEas
Tom Robinson‘s employer.
Mr. Cunningham
One of the poor Cunningham farmers
and the father of Walter Cunningham.
Ms. Caroline
Scout’s first grade teacher.
Mayella
Mayella Ewell – Bob Ewell‘s daughter and oldest child.
Lonely, friendless, and the only woman in her family, Mayella
accuses Tom Robinson of raping her.
_Theme 1 _
To Kill a Mockingbird is largely remembered of in terms of the trial
of Tom Robinson and its racist outcome. For this reason, people
often think that the book’s theme is simple, a straightforward
criticism of racism and evil. But To Kill a Mockingbird is actually
more complicated (and interesting). Except in the case of Bob
Ewell, the novel avoids simple portrayals and criticisms of “evil.”
Instead, it shows through Scout and Jem’s experiences that
Maycomb and its citizens are a complicated mixture of good and
bad, full of people with strengths and weaknesses.
There are two characters of almost complete good in To Kill
a Mockingbird: Atticus and Boo Radley. But they are good in
different ways. Boo maintains his goodness by hiding from the
world, while Atticus engages with it. Atticus acknowledges the
evil in people and the world and fights against that evil, but he
also appreciates what is good in the very same people who
through fault or weakness might be supporting an evil cause. Atticus
believes that everyone has a basic human dignity, and that
he therefore owes each person not only respect, but the effort
to try to understand their point of view. Atticus tries to instill this
worldview in Scout when he tells her that instead of condemning
people for doing things that she thinks are cruel, or unfair, or just
plain weird, she should first try “standing in their skin.”
Theme 2
Atticus’s belief in treating and respecting everyone as an
individual is contrasted in To Kill a Mockingbird with a number
of other worldviews. These other visions are all quite different
from each other—they are religious, racist, classist—but they
all share one thing in common: they treat people as groups,
demand conformity, and give no respect or credit to individuals.
In other words, they are all forms of prejudice, which is
a preconceived notion about a person based on the groups
to which that person belongs. Over and over again, To Kill a
Mockingbird reveals prejudice not just as closed-minded and
dangerous, but also as ridiculous.
The most obvious form of prejudice in the novel is racism,
which causes otherwise upstanding white citizens of Maycomb
to accept the testimony of an obviously corrupt white
man over the evidence supporting the testimony from a black
man. Yet prejudice is also visible in the racially condescending
Mrs. Grace Merriweather; in Aunt Alexandra’s and many
other character’s belief in the importance of social class; in
the gender stereotypes that people try to force on Scout; and
even in the way the town views Boo Radley as a monster
because he acts differently from everyone else.
Theme 3
In the three years covered by To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout and
Jem grow up. At the start of the book they are innocents, with
an uncomplicated sense of what’s good (Atticus, the people
of Maycomb) and what’s evil (Boo Radley). By the end of the
book, the children have lost their innocence and gained a more
complex understanding of the world, in which bad and good
are present and visible in almost everyone. As the children
grow into the adult world, though, they don’t just accept what
they see. They question what doesn’t make sense to them—
prejudice, hatred, and violence. So while To Kill a Mockingbird
shows three children as they lose their innocence, it also uses
their innocence to look freshly at the world of Maycomb and
criticize its flaws.
Like every kid growing up, Scout attends school for the first
time. But rather than contribute to her education, Scout’s school
is depicted as rigid to the point of idiocy, with teachers who
criticize students who got on early start on reading and hate the
Nazis but can’t see the racism present in their own town. To Kill
a Mockingbird does not so much explore standardized school
education as condemn it, showing how it emphasizes rote facts
and policies designed to create conformist children rather than
promote creative critical thinking, sympathy, and mutual understanding
across racial and socioeconomic boundaries.
Theme 4
Many people, including Jem and Scout when they’re young,
mix up courage with strength. They think that courage is the
ability and willingness to use strength to get your way. But Atticus
defines courage as “when you know you’re licked before
you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter
what.” Courage, in To Kill a Mockingbird, is not about winning
or losing. It’s about thinking long and hard about what’s right
instead of relying on personal prejudice or gut reaction, and
then doing what’s right whether you win or lose. To Kill a
Mockingbird is filled with examples of courage, from Mrs.
Dubose’s fight against her morphine addiction, to Atticus’s
determination to face down the racism of the town, to Mr.
Underwood’s willingness to face down his own racist feelings
and support what he knows, in the end, is right.
Theme 5
Maycomb is a small town, with all of the characteristics implicit
in small town life: everyone knows everyone else’s business,
which can lead to endless and mostly harmless gossip, but
more importantly makes the community extremely intimate
and close-knit. The first part of To Kill a Mockingbird focuses on
this close-knit community, because when they’re young Scout
and Jem believe that’s what Maycomb is.
To an extent, the young Scout and Jem are right: Maycomb
is a small, safe, peaceful, intimate community. Yet as Scout
and Jem grow up, they come to see another side to their small
town. They discover that the town has a fiercely maintained
and largely illogical social hierarchy based on wealth, history,
and race; ensures its safety through a communal insistence on
conformity that subjects anyone who does not conform to dislike
and mistrust; and gains its peace by resisting change and
ignoring injustice. This is not to say that To Kill a Mockingbird
is a condemnation of small town life in the South. Rather, the
novel sees the town in much the same terms it sees individuals:
as containing wisdom and blindness, good and evil, and for
all of that possessing its own special dignity
