How is Atticus’s Comment ‘You Never Know Someone Until You Climb Into Their Skin and Walk Around In It’ Central To Our Understanding of the Text.

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Meera Pithia 11B

HOW S ATTICUS’S COMMENT ‘YOU NEVER KNOW SOMEONE UNTIL YOU CLIMB INTO THEIR SKIN AND WALK AROUND IN IT’ CENTRAL TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE TEXT

A dominant theme in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is prejudice and discrimination.  Not just racial prejudice, but also prejudice that the people of Maycomb impose on each other because of family background and social status.  Jem can see how Maycomb is separated into different classes of people:

‘There’s four kinds of folks in the world.  There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbours, there’s the kind like the Cunningham’s out in the woods, the kind like the Ewell’s down at the dump, and the Negroes.’

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is narrated by Scout.  All of the events in the novel are seen from her point of view.  This also adds humour to the novel because sometimes she does not fully understand what is going on.  For example, Jem gasps long before she does when they realise the items in the tree are presents from Boo Radley to them.  The reader has to piece things together that Scout does not understand.  Throughout the novel you can see how Scout changes.  She begins to look at things from another persons view.  For example, she begins to understand the feelings of Boo Radley.  An advantage of looking at the story through a child’s eyes is that the injustice in the community stands out a lot more because the children are aware of it for the first time.  Scout believes that no matter how the human race is split up into different types of people, everyone is the same:

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‘I think there’s just one type of folks.  Folks.’

Boo Radley introduces the theme of prejudice.  Stephanie Crawford describes him as:

‘So upright he took the word of God as his only law’

At the beginning of the novel, the children see him as a ghost or a monster:

‘He was a thin leathery man with colourless eyes, so colourless they did not reflect light.  His cheekbones were sharp and his mouth was wide, with a thin upper lip and full lower lip.’

Gradually, the children realise that Boo is not the sort of ...

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