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 social position. She is outstandingly 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 eternally 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 Maycomb.One cursorily 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. spot 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 climb trees with Jem and Dill. She does not always grasp social niceties (she tells her teacher that star 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 Hitlers preconceived idea 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 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 fall out 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 Atticuss wisdom, Scout learns that though human 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 liberality and understanding. Scouts 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 beseeming cynical or jaded. Though she is still a child at the end of the book, Scouts perspective on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a unspoiled grown-up.