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Book Review (To Kill A Mocking Bird)
Set in a small Alabaman town in the 1940s, the novel’s strength lies in demonstrating how bigotry works through stereotyping. Slap a label on that’s a general condemnation and then you needn’t look at the unique human being behind it. The title of the book pinpoints this theme: ‘to kill a mockingbird,’ says one of the characters, ‘is a sin (because mockingbirds) don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.’ But a mockingbird is a bird, birds eat up crops, therefore mockingbirds are fair game. When the stereotype wins, justice loses — and the mockingbird, a victim, not a vandal, is dead. That society is full of human mockingbirds, stereotyped and then unjustly punished, is the theme of the book. One ‘mockingbird’ is literally killed. The alternative is to find the individual behind the label. Before judging anybody, says the novel, you should ‘climb into his skin and walk around in it’ so that you see the world from his viewpoint. Tolerance, therefore, is not a passive virtue. It involves a positive act of identification, always requiring sensitivity, and sometimes great courage. The children through whose eyes the action is seen demonstrate this repeatedly. Once, for example, they learn to overcome their horror of a dying neighbour (an ancient, dribbling, convulsing morphine addict). They eventually stop seeing her from the outside and came to admire her for her internal qualities, but it’s a tough lesson. And if tolerance is an active virtue, the novel goes on to suggest, then punishment can be an active vice if it is motivated by negative emotions like ignorance or fear. Inappropriate punishment — like the racists’ injustices to the black community — creates more problems than they pretend to solve. Plainly, the incident is meant to impress upon the reader that Finch chooses nonviolence through strength, not weakness. But a much more i... Please login to view comments from other users.
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