Contents introduction chapter I. Author and synopsis of the story

CHAPTER II. Role of emotions in “To kill a Mockingbird”
2.1. Character and characterization
Every fiction employs characters to serve its story. The story will not interesting or it can be dead if there are no character. Character itself has the meaning Any of the persons involved in a story or play, or the distinguishing moral qualities and personal traits of a character. Character is a basic element in much imaginative literature, and therefore they merit the considerable attention paid to him. When critics speak of character, they mean any person who figures in a literary work, not particularly or eccentric one; sometimes a character does not actually appear but it is merely talked about ( Potter 1967:1) Social status differences are largely explored through Maycomb’s overcomplicated social hierarchy, the ins and outs of which the children are constantly baffling. The relatively well-off Finches stand near the top of the social hierarchy of Maycomb, with most of the people below them. Ignorant farmers like the Cunninghams are under the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells is under the Cunninghams. But, despite its abundance of admirable qualities, the black community in Maycomb squats below evens the Ewells, allowing Bob Ewell to compensate for his own insignificance by persecuting Tom Robinson. The novel shows that these rigid social distinctions that make up so much of the adult world are both irrational and harmful. Discussions are at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird on bigotry in general, and racism in particular. Conflicts over prejudice trigger some of the novel’s most unforgettable and convincing scenes. Racial conflict causes the story’s two dramatic deaths.⁷ To Kill a Mockingbird is a simplistic and moralistic view of racial prejudice on one level. Atticus risks his reputation, his community position, and ultimately his children’s safety because he’s not racist, and therefore good. Bob Ewell falsely accuses a black man of rape, openly spits on Atticus, and threatens to kill a boy for being racist, and therefore evil. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the treatment of prejudice is not only simplistic in morality, but also in perspective. To Kill a Mockingbird’s name has very little direct relation to the story, but in the novel it carries a lot of symbolic weight. The “mockingbird” comes to reflect the concept of innocence in this tale of innocent people killed by evil. Killing a mockingbird, therefore, is killing innocence. A number of characters (Jem, Tom Robinson, Dill, Boo Radley, Mr. Raymond) can be identified throughout the book as mocking birds— innocent people who were wounded or destroyed by contact with evil. This connection is made explicit several times in the novel between the title of the novel and its main theme. Atticus argues that killing a mockingbird is sin. Mockingbirds never hurt anybody and are in no way pests. The mockingbird comes to represent true goodness and purity. Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are examples of human “mockingbirds. Scout and Jem are looked after for by their black housekeeper, Calpurnia in the novel. While Scout shares with Calpurnia her differences, Calpurnia serves as the children’s mother-figure. Atticus, who acknowledges that Calpurnia is educated, revered and respected her. Yet it’s speech that separates the white from the black community. Tom Robinson’s trial acts as the novel’s crucial and highly anticipated moment. Tom Robinson is charged with raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. The Ewell family, representing the lower class, lacks education and resources. As the oldest child, to her younger siblings, Mayella becomes a mother figure. Bob Ewell represents bigotry and racial prejudice while Atticus represents justice and ethics. We quickly learn for Tom Robinson that he is convicted purely based on the color of his skin. Nonetheless, Atticus is struggling for justice. Atticus explains the ugly truth to Jem and Scout: “The white man always wins in our courts when it’s the word of a white man against a black man.” Atticus displays disgust with white people taking advantage of the ignorance of black people. Scout clashes with her teacher Miss Caroline on the first day of class. Miss Caroline is offering money to one of her students, Walter Cunningham, at lunchtime. Scout explains to Miss Caroline that the Cunninghams are suffering from poverty when Walter refuses the money. Scout narrates a time when Atticus acted as the Cunningham’s counsel, and the Cunninghams paid Atticus in the form of stovewood and hickory nuts, without having any money to repay Atticus. Jem invites Walter to their home for lunch later in the story. Walter pours molasses “with a generous hand on his vegetables and meat” while eating their meal. Not only does this act cause Scout to comment and ridicule Walter, it also demonstrates a gap in rank between the Cunninghams and the Finches. Scout is a very unusual little girl, both in her own qualities and in her social position. She is unusually intelligent (she learns to read before beginning school), unusually confident (she fights boys without fear), unusually thoughtful (she worries about the essential goodness and evil 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 proper Southern world of Maycomb⁸. She had intelligence was gotten naturally, she is able to read without anybody teaches her. she follows him to read it, when her father is reading a newspaper, as the following quotation below: I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read. But somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church—was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. (Harper Lee, 2010: 23). 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 individuality without bogging her down in fussy social hypocrisies and notions of propriety. While most girls in Scout’s position would be wearing dresses and learning manners, Scout, thanks to Atticus’s hands-off parenting style, wears overalls and learns to climb trees with Jem and Dill. She does not always grasp social niceties (she tells her teacher that one of her fellow students is too poor to pay her back for lunch), and human behavior often baffles her (as when one of her teachers criticizes Hitler’s prejudice against Jews while indulging in her own prejudice against blacks), but Atticus’s protection of Scout from hypocrisy and social pressure has rendered her open, forthright, and well meaning. At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no experience 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 question of whether she will 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. Thanks to Atticus’s wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has a great capacity for evil, it also 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. Scout’s development into a person capable of assuming that outlook marks the culmination of the novel and indicates that, whatever 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, Scout’s perspective on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a near grownup. Jeremy "Jem" Finch is the brother of Scout who was four years older than she is. Jem represents the idea of bravery in the novel, and the way that his definition changes over the course of the story is important. The shift that occurs probably has as much to do with age as experience, although the experiences provide a better framework for the reader. He sees bravery from Mrs. Dubose's addiction, from Atticus and the mad dog, and from Scout's confrontation with the mob, among other incidents. Along the way, he grows from a boy who drags his sister along as a coconspirator to a maturing young man who helps Scout understand the problems and events around them.⁹ Jem and Scout both learn throughout the novel to look at the good in human nature, as well as the bad. Jem was suddenly furious. He leaped off the bed, grabbed me by the collar and shook me. “I never wanta hear about that courthouse again, ever, ever, you hear me? You hear me? Don’t you ever say one word to me about it again, you hear? Now go on!” (Harper Lee, 2010:331). If Scout is an innocent girl who is exposed to evil at an early age and forced to develop an adult moral outlook, Jem finds himself in an even more turbulent situation. His shattering experience at Tom Robinson’s trial occurs just as he is entering puberty, a time when life is complicated and traumatic enough. His disillusionment upon seeing that justice does not always prevail leaves him vulnerable and confused at a critical, formative point in his life. Nevertheless, he admirably upholds the commitment to justice that Atticus instilled in him and maintains it with deep conviction throughout the novel. Unlike the jaded Mr. Raymond, Jem is not without hope: Atticus tells Scout that Jem simply needs time to process what he has learned. The strong presence of Atticus in Jem’s life seems to promise that he will recover his equilibrium. Later in his life, Jem is able to see that Boo Radley’s unexpected aid indicates there is good in people. Even before the end of the novel, Jem shows signs of having learned a positive lesson from the trial; for instance, at the beginning of Chapter 25, he refuses to allow Scout to squash a roly-poly bug because it has done nothing to harm her. After seeing the unfair destruction of Tom Robinson, Jem now wants to protect the fragile and harmless. The idea that Jem resolves his cynicism and moves toward a happier life is supported by the beginning of the novel, in which a grown-up Scout remembers talking to Jem about the events that make up the novel’s plot. Scout says that Jem pinpointed the children’s initial interest in Boo Radley at the beginning of the story, strongly implying that he understood what Boo represented to them and, like Scout, managed to shed his innocence without losing his hope. Charles Baker "Dill" Harris is Jem and Scout's best friend who lives in Maycomb only during the summer. His goal throughout the novel is to get the reclusive Boo Radley to come out of his house, which he hasn't left in years. For the first few summers the children concoct many plans to lure him out, until they are finally reprimanded by Atticus. Dill promises to marry Scout, and they become "engaged". One night Dill runs away from his home in the city, because he feels like he is being replaced in the family by his stepfather. He gets on a train and goes to Maycomb County, then hides under Scout's bed until she finds him. Unlike Scout and Jem he lacks the security of family love. He is unwanted and unloved by his parents; "They do get on a lot better without me, I cannot help them any". As Francis, another Finch from the novel, says, "He hasn't got a home, he just gets passed around from relative to relative." Even Miss Rachel, with whom he stays over the summer, is not a woman deserving of a child's trust and love.¹⁰ He is well aware of her drinking habits. He is described as not having a father—he doesn't know where he lives or when he'll come back, if he does. Calpurnia is the Finch family's housekeeper, whom the children love and Atticus deeply respects (he remarks in her defense that she "never indulged [the children] like most colored nurses"); she can be described as a strict mother figure. In Scout's early life she provides discipline, instruction, love, and essentially fills the maternal role for them after their mother's death. Calpurnia is one of the few black characters in the novel who is able to read and write, and it is she who taught Scout to write. She learned how to read from Miss Maudie's aunt, Miss Buford, who taught her how to read out of "Blackstone's Commentaries", a book given to her by Jem and Scout's grandfather (Atticus's dad). Living in Maycomb's African American and Caucasian communities, Calpurnia has two different perspectives on life, and Scout notices that she speaks and acts differently among her black friends than at their home. Because of her unique status, she can relate to both sides of stories.While everyone in the novel is filtered through Scout’s perception, Calpurnia in particular appears for a long time more as Scout’s idea of her than as a real person. At the beginning of the novel, Scout appears to think of Calpurnia as the wicked stepmother to Scout’s own Cinderella. Furthermore, at the start of the novel, when Scout disrespects a child from her class, Walter Cunningham, Calpurnia yells at Scout for criticizing his ways, ones very different from her own. However, towards the end of the book, Scout views Calpurnia as someone she can look up to and realizes Calpurnia has only protected her over the years. Arthur "Boo" Radley is one of the harder characters to understand in To Kill a Mockingbird, and slowly reveals himself throughout the novel. Arthur Radley (also known as Boo Radley) appears as a very quiet, reclusive character, who only passively presents himself, until the children's final interaction with Bob Ewell. Most of Maycomb believes he is a horrible person, due to the rumors spread about him, and a trial he underwent as a teenager. It is implied during the story that Boo is a very lonely man, who attempted to reach out to the children for love and friendship. Throughout the novel, he is shown as kind and generous. It was not until the end of the book, when he saved Jem and Scout Finch's lives from Mr. Ewell's assault, that he was paid notice. It wasn't until hours after the attack, when the family was in Jem’s room watching over him, that Scout finally realizes that it was Boo Radley who had saved them, and was watching over her all along. When Heck Tate attempted to avert blame from Jem, stating that Bob Ewell simply "fell on his knife", after Atticus clearly thought Jem had murdered Bob Ewell, Tate indirectly revealed the truth: Boo Radley killed Bob Ewell in order to defend the children. Scout described him as being sickly white, with a thin mouth and hair and grey eyes, almost as if he was blind. During the same night, when Boo requests that Scout walk him back to the Radley house, Scout takes a moment to picture what it would be like to be Boo Radley, while standing on his porch. Boo doesn't talk much, but Scout describes him as being very soft spoken and quiet. Boo Radley's heroics and the subsequent "coverup" by Atticus, Sheriff Tate and Scout can be read as a wise refusal of fame. As Tate notes, if word gets out that Boo killed Ewell, Boo would be inundated with gifts and visits, something that would be calamitous for him. The precocious Scout recognizes the danger. Renown would "kill the mockingbird." Boo Radley is a ghost that haunts the book yet manifests himself at just the right moments in just the right way. He is, arguably, the most potent character in the whole book and as such, inspires the other key characters to save him when he needs saving. Miss Maudie Atkinson lived across the street from the Finch family. She had known the Finches for many years, having been brought up on the Buford place, which was near the Finch's ancestral home, Finch Landing. She is described as a woman of about 50 who enjoys baking and gardening; her cakes are especially held in high regard. She is also considered by some to be a symbolic Mockingbird, as she is frequently harassed by devout "Foot-Washing Baptists", who tell her that her enjoyment of gardening is a sin. Miss Maudie befriends Scout and Jem and tells them about Atticus as a boy.¹¹ During the course of the novel, her house burns down; however, she shows remarkable courage throughout this (even joking that she wanted to burn it down herself to make more room for her flowers). She is not prejudiced, unlike many of her Southern neighbors. Also, she is one of the few adults that Jem and Scout hold in high regard and respect. She does not act condescendingly towards them, even though they are young children. It is important to note that Miss Maudie fully explained that "it is a sin to kill a mockingbird", where as Atticus Finch initially brought up the subject, but didn't go into depth. When Jem gets older, and doesn't want to be bothered by Scout, Maudie keeps her from going mad.