Tom helps Mayella Ewell despite his disability, never once taking money off her, simply because he has a kind heart and Mayella liked him because he was the only person who ever gave her time and true respect He is a harmless man, but a victim of racial prejudice and like the mockingbird, never means to do wrong to anyone, instead always trying his best to please people, which is in the end what he gets punished for.
‘All mockingbirds to is sing their hearts out’, and Toms way of ‘singing’ is helping people, he is clearly innocent and even the jury know this but ‘a white word is always taken over a blacks’, so he is still killed. His death is likened to ‘the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters…’ and when looking at the title ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ we can see that this is exactly what was done. Tom was an innocent man who was killed brutally.
Boo Radley is the second character that conforms to the mockingbird type, although his ‘mockingbird’ is not actually killed he still represents many of the traits that a mockingbird has.
Boo Radley is constantly mentioned, popping up through out the book and the relevance of his character does not become clear until near the end of the book, when he saves Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell.
He is introduced at the beginning of the book as:
Six-and-a-half feet tall, he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch…his hands were bloodstained…a long jagged scar ran across his face, what teeth he had were yellow and rotton…’
He is created by Scout, as some kind of evil monster and this impression continues quite a way through the book, as the children strive to see him, playing games involving running up to his house etc. But as the children grow up, mature and change so does their perception of him. By the end of the book the reader only feels sympathy for Boo and no longer sees him as a horrible, malicious giant but as something smaller, shy, unconfident, and weak.
He is an ill man ‘He coughed his dreadful railing cough, and was so shaken he had to sit down again’ and when he is saving the children, Scout describes how she heard ‘a man breathing heavily, breathing heavily and staggering’ showing the weakness of himself because of having been ‘caged up’, like a mocking bird is weak because of its smallness.
‘…his thin frame to his torn denim shirt. His face was as white as his hands…his cheeks were thin to hollowness, his mouth was wide…eyes were so colourless I thought he was blind. His hair was dead and thin’
This is the first time Scout ever sees Boo and it is the moment when her perception of him as being only something she’d imagined him to be, burly and wicked, changes to seeing him as he really is, insecure and frail. This is when he is totally revealed as a mockingbird, lonely ‘lonelier then Boo Radley’, and weak, delicate and defenceless. He only ever stayed out of the way of people, but as Jem grows to realise it is ‘because he want to’. Like a Mockingbird stays out the way, sitting up out of reach in tree, singing for the people below, so does Boo Radley, who innocently never intends to hurt anyone, but his way of singing is his small gifts to the children.
The first gift is some gum found in a knothole of a tree, and after that the children continuously find small gifts, unaware of who is placing them there. Boo also sews up and folds back a pair of Jems trousers when he catches them on Boo’s fence, and lastly puts a blanket around Scout when she is cold and watching the fire. The children do not acknowledge the kindness that they are receiving or even who it is from until the end of the book. ‘ He gave us two soup dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives’, and when they finally realise they truly appreciate it.
Like a mockingbird sings it hear out for people, so does Boo Radley, despite being caged up he still sings, but in his own special way.
Boo’s ‘mockingbird’ is not actually killed, but saved instead and we read what the sin to do to Boo would be. ‘draggin’ him and his shy ways into the limelight – to me, that’s a sin. If it was any other man, it’d be different, but not his man’. Mr. Tate makes this powerful speech, and he means that revealing Boo Radley as a hero, would simply destroy the little of him left. As mentioned earlier, Boo Radley stays in his house, away from curious and intruding eyes because he wants to.
Boo Radley is also seen as a mockingbird from another view. The mockingbird has no song of it’s own, it only imitates other birds. In the same way Boo Radley is only ever seen through the eyes of other people. He does not have a character of his own, what the reader knows about him is only through Scout and rumours that other people have created.
Tom Robinson’s disability of his arm and his colour is his vulnerability, Boo’s disability is his shyness and fear to go out the house and the mockingbirds disability is its ‘oddness’ and its smallness. For each character these things I have just pointed out is what makes them stand out and causes society to label them ‘misfits’, creating a burden of un-acceptance above their shoulders.
The idea of a mocking bird, has something to do with striving to fit in, because it does not have its own songs but copies other birds, to ‘fit in’.
‘A solitary mocker poured out his repertoire in blissful unawareness of whose tree he sat in, plunging from the shrill kee, kee of the sunflower bird to the irascible qua-ack of a blue jay, to the sad lament of Poor Will’
Racism, discrimination and prejudice, which both Tom and Boo experience together, are based along a person being ‘different’ in some way or another and not conforming or fitting in with normal society, and this is exactly what Tom and Boo do, and because of this, one is murdered and one suffers and life of being caged up.
They are both simple creatures, comfortable lifestyles that do not evolve around the people of Maycomb. Because they are different and people do not know them for who they truly are, they are unjustly persecuted. They are misunderstood, they hold little social value, and are generally assumed guilty.
The symbolism of the mockingbird reveals the prejudice and narrow-mindedness of society, their fears of things different and the crimes the committed to innocent people. Before Scout falls asleep at he end of the book the describes the story which happens to someone falsely accused of doing something he never did, exactly like Tom Robinson and Boo Radley, the two mockingbirds of the story so wrongly treated by others, but when it comes down to it, it is ‘only children who weep’.
