Even the jury who sentenced him to death had nothing personal against him, they found him guilty mostly because to take the word of a black man over two whites would somehow create a threat towards themselves. Having the death of Tom Robinson is symbolistic of the white folks being fear-full of what this man was capable of doing, just because of his race.
However, Tom Robinson is not the only mockingbird in the story. Boo Radley is another harmless creature who is the victim of cruelty. He is unjustly regarded as an evil person and used as a channel for blaming for everything bad happening in town. Women are afraid of him and so are children. When the sheriff decided that he would not arrest Boo Radley for killing Bob Ewell and that would present his death as an accident, Atticus asked Scout if she understood the meaning of this decision. Scout replied that she did. Her exact words were: "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?" .
Boo here is also compared to the gentle bird and again it would be a 'sin' to be punished for the murder he committed. Tom Robinson's case may be bound up with a very complex problem of racial prejudice not only in their community, but country wide. Many people could argue that any community can have its own form of a “Boo Radley”, but for me the use of this character, is to possibly prove the point that he isn’t a freak, its his decision to stay inside and lead his own life. And from what the reader can gather, he’s not a evil or wicked person as many people think. The evidence that suggests this is when he comforts Scout with a blanket on the night of Miss Maudie’s house fire, and when he himself puts his life on the line to save another.
The symbol of the mockingbird can be applied to Boo Radley from another point of view as well. The mockingbird has no song of its own. It just imitates other birds. In the same way, Boo Radley is seen through the eyes of other people. He does not have a character of his own. What the reader knows about him is what other people say. He is believed to have stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors, to peep through windows at nights, to be "six-and-a-half feet tall, dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, his hands were blood-stained; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time" . That of course, are purely sex-starved house wives making up rumours. In fact the rumours created by them towns people, tell us more about the themselves rather than Boo Radley himself.
Symbolism is indeed used extensively in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The symbolism reveals the prejudice and narrow-mindedness of the citizens of Maycomb County, their fears and the immoral things they did. It also reveals an attempt to “klenz” people from these feelings, by a wise hero figure, a model to the community, Atticus Finch, as well as his two children, who surely follow in his footsteps. The story ends with the reading of a book by Atticus, The Grey Ghost, another symbol perhaps for Boo Radley whose "face was as white as his hands and his grey eyes were so colourless" , a description fitting to one of a ghost. Before she falls asleep Scout describes the story which happens to be about 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.
© Jeremy Barr
