At the end of the novel, Scout says "He was really nice." Atticus replies "Most people are Scout, when you finally see them". Discuss the importance of this as indicating a major theme in the novel.

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Alex Hitchcock 11FC

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GCSE English Coursework: To Kill A Mockingbird:

At the end of the novel, Scout says “He was really nice.” Atticus replies “Most people are Scout, when you finally see them”. Discuss the importance of this as indicating a major theme in the novel.

To Kill a Mockingbird was written in 1962 by Harper Lee, but set in the 1930s just after the Wall Street crash, which consequently led to the great depression. It is a novel, read by a lot of people as a moral parable. The novel deals with such things as prejudice, poverty and parental education. This novel is set in a small quiet town called Maycomb County, in Alabama, a Southern State of America. The people in the town are represented in a pyramid of hierarchy, with middle class, white professionals, at the summit of this hierarchical structure.

The quote in the title of this essay title shows how Atticus educated his children on how bad prejudice was and he tries to repel them from the majority of racist thoughts of Maycomb. When he replies to Scout in the novel, “Most people are Scout when you finally see them”, he is trying to put across the fact that all people have their faults and their good attributes, but many people are clouded with other people’s gossip and follow the crowd. I think he is trying to say that if people think about someone deep down who they hate, they realise they don’t have much of a reason to. He is teaching the children to get to know people before they place a judgement on them, not to judge a book by its cover. Atticus’ reply to Scout was said in a moral sense. To see the real decency of a person you need to be able to analyse everything about them, not their skin colour but their true personalities as a person.  "You never really understand a person until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Once you discover who they really are you can then place your own justified judgement. This quote relates closely to the quote in the title as you need to consider people from their point of view, then you can “Finally see them”.  This separated Atticus apart from the rest of the characters in the novel as he surpasses face value and sees people for who they really are. This conveys courage in Atticus’ personality as gossip can spread in such a small town such as Maycomb, and perceptions of people can easily be altered by what the majority of people think. The racism and prejudice in this era of America was very open, but people were not aware of it being racism, but a way of life. Bob Ewell named Atticus a “nigger lover” in the novel, and people didn’t treat black people in a humane way. Atticus realised this and spend his life trying to introduce equality into his town, something that didn’t exist at all. “There’s something in this world that makes men loose their heads – they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white mans world against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.”

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 Atticus, a respected lawyer in the town is at the central core of this novel. He has a lot of moral authority in the small town and is a prime example of someone who is at the top of the hierarchy. Jem and Scout, also knows as Jean Louise, are his young children, with Scout being the narrator of this novel. She describes the events of her childhood in a retrospective style and it shows how she begins to understand, but not accept the society in which she lived over the duration of the story. Atticus is a ...

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