“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit em, but remember its a sin to kill a mockingbird. ” Lee says that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because they only make music for people to enjoy, and they do no damage to anything such as other birds do.
Lee is right the mockingbird dose nothing wrong, such as the mockingbirds in the book. They never do anything wrong, but they sometimes are misunderstood and considered bad by other people. Boo is one of the mockingbirds in the book. He only gives to the children. He gives them many different things through the knothole in the tree. Boo also gives the children a game to play during the day, “Boo Radley.
” Later Boo gives them the most important thing of all, their lives. He is also a mockingbird in another way, when Scout falls out of the tire he gives them his music, laughter. At the end of the book Boo ends up going back into his house never to be seen again by Scout. He did this because he was a mockingbird caged up for a long time and was not ready to be free.
The solution for him was to go back to his cage that he knew and was safe. The other mockingbird is Tom Robinson because he does not do anything wrong. He was a very nice man, he would do things for people if they needed something done that they could not do themselves. An example of this is when he helps Mayella and refused to accept the money that she offered him. The difference between him and Boo is that even though he did not do anything wrong he was still found guilty of a crime that he probably did not commit.
The reason that Tom was convicted is mainly because he was a back man accused of a crime by a white woman. The common thing that both of these characters share is that they are both somehow connected to Bob Ewell. Boo is connected to him because Boo killed him when he attacked the children. Tom is connected to Bob because Bob is the main reason that Tom was tried and found guilty in the first place. This common connection to Bob connects Boo and Tom because the reason that Bob attacked the children was because he wanted to get back at the rest of the world for what it did to him.
He must have thought the children were a good place to start. Getting Tom convicted was the first step toward what he was trying to accomplish and it gave him a little power rush. The character that understands both of the “mockingbirds” is Scout. She knew a lot about Boo and was the only character that treated Boo as a real civilized human being.
An example of the way she treated Boo as a real person was when she took him to see Jem and another example is the way she walked him back to his house like a gentleman. She also understood that Tom would be found guilty even thought of the evidence pointed to Bob as the one who beat Mayella. At one point near the end of the book a mockingbird is heard after Boo saves the children. The reason that this was put into the book was to show that Boo was meant to represent a mockingbird. He only tried to help the children, and he gave them many gifts and did nothing wrong, almost exactly Lees definition of a mockingbird.
Lee made mockingbirds an important part of the book but their position as mockingbirds were never clearly stated. Lee also made one person simply to commit sin by trying to “kill” the mockingbirds. Also the fact that Atticus said that it was a sin, and he never said anything was a sin before. Lee had him say this because he would be defending one of the mockingbirds in the book and it was just a hint of foreshadowing.
The mockingbirds were misunderstood and treated unfairly. They were good but not everyone thought that. Lee turned a simple title into a complex book
