"to kill a mockingbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Charles Baker Harris, known as Dill, is Jem and Scout's first friend from outside Maycomb. In many respects Dill is a contrast to Jem and Scout. They come from an old family, and have a father who loves them very much. Dill, on the other hand, is an unwanted child. He has no father, and his mother does not want to be bothered with him.

Dill has white-blond hair and blue eyes, a combination that makes him look rather like a wizened old man. "I'm little but I'm old," Dill tells Jem and Scout at their first meeting, and in some ways this is true. In his short life Dill has seen and done many things that Jem and Scout have not; he has even seen the movie Dracula. On the other hand, Dill's stories are not always true; some are a product of his lively imagination. Dill's imagination is the spark that sets the children dreaming of ways to lure the hermit Boo Radley out of his house. In this sense Dill is responsible for setting the action of the plot into motion.

^^^^^^^^^^TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: ARTHUR RADLEY

Even though you do not see Arthur Radley, called Boo Radley by the children, until the final chapters of the book, he is important throughout the story. You know very little for certain about Boo's life. The one reliable story you are told is that he was a normal teenager who then made friends with a wild crowd. When he got into a minor scrape and was threatened with being sent away to a state school, Arthur's father promised that he would keep him out of trouble from then on. Mr. Radley kept his word all too well, and from that day Boo was never seen outside the house. And when Mr. Radley died, Boo's elder brother Nathan moved into the house and continued to rule Boo with an iron hand.

Aside from this brief family history, you don't learn much about Boo Radley. In fact, the theories that various people in the neighborhood put forth to explain Boo tell you more about the theorizers than about Boo himself. Miss Crawford, who loves gossip, spreads the tale that Boo Radley roams the neighborhood at night peeping into people's windows--especially hers. Scout and Jem, early on in the story, imagine Boo as over six feet tall and horrendously ugly, a monster who strangles cats with his bare hands and then eats them. Miss Maudie, an optimistic woman who believes in enjoying nature and the good things in life, is sure that Boo is the victim of his father's overstrict and gloomy moral code.

One story about Boo that you hear early in the novel is the rumor that he once stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors. At first this sounds like nothing more than another of the children's wild ideas. Yet, late in the novel Boo stabs Bob Ewell to death. So it turns out that Boo is capable of violence after all.

Oddly enough, even as you learn that Boo actually is the killer of Bob Ewell, he seems less frightening now than he did before. Face to face with the neighborhood hermit for the first time, Scout sees that he is really a shy, pale, harmless man--a middle-aged child. You are meant to see that Boo struck out against Bob Ewell in the innocent unthinking way that a child might strike out against an act of cruelty. Thus, by the final scene of the novel the roles of Boo and Scout are reversed--he is the childlike innocent and Scout, though still a child in years, is already playing the part of the adult, protecting Boo from a world too complex for him to understand.


^^^^^^^^^^TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: SETTING

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Maycomb County, an imaginary district in southern Alabama. The time is the early 1930s, the years of the Great Depression when poverty and unemployment were widespread in the United States. For parts of the deep South like Maycomb County, the Depression meant only that the bad times that had been going on for decades got a little bit worse. These rural areas had long been poor and undeveloped. Black people worked for low wages in the fields. White farmers were more likely to own land, but they were cash poor. It was common for children to go to school barefoot, and to suffer from ringworm and other diseases. Although automobiles had been around for some years, most farm families still depended on horses for transportation and to plow their fields.

Scout's family, the Finches, belong to the elite of local society. Atticus Finch is an educated man who goes to work in a clean shirt. The family owns a nice house and can afford to hire a black housekeeper. Still, the Finches are well-off only in comparison with the farm families who live in the same county. They, too, have little money.

Instead of bringing people together, the shared experience of poverty seemed to contribute to making the South more class-conscious than other parts of the country. One reason why people like Scout's Aunt Alexandra place so much importance on family background and "gentle breeding" is that these concepts were just about all that could be counted on to separate a family like the Finches from the truly poor. The advantages of education, a professional career, and owning one's own home did not last long if a family happened to have a run of bad luck. The fear that the family's position could only get worse, never better, helped to turn some people into social snobs.

You will notice that none of the characters in this story takes much interest in the world beyond Maycomb County. When Scout's class studies current events in school, most of the children are not even sure what a "current event" is. Even the adults seem to take little interest in such developments as the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt or the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. People seldom travel far from their homes. And they almost never eat a meal in a restaurant, even a cheap restaurant. When Dill eats in a diner, this is enough to make him a minor celebrity in Scout's eyes.

Of course, the most important difference between the South of the 1930s and the South today is that in the 1930s a system of segregation was in force. Blacks and whites were forbidden by law to mix in schools, in movie theaters, or on trains. They could not use the same rest rooms or drink from the same water fountains. Blacks had very little opportunity to get an education. Many kinds of jobs were not open to them. Black people were not allowed to vote. Nor could they serve on juries, not even when the defendant was a black man. Any black person (and, for that matter, any white) who challenged the system of segregation publicly would have been in serious danger of being killed by prosegregation fanatics. In fact, segregation was taken so much for granted that it is not even described in the novel in so many words. Not even Atticus Finch, the character who represents idealism and a devotion to justice, ever attacks the basic system of segregation. Nevertheless, just because Atticus believes a black man's word over a white man and woman's, many people in Maycomb feel that he is undermining the system that keeps whites on top of the social order.

By the time To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 segregated school had been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and the struggle for civil rights in the South was underway. At this time, the South had a very bad reputation in the eyes of the world. White people in other parts of the United States tended to feel superior to the bigots of the deep South. In many cases, they had not yet been forced to confront the fact that racial prejudice existed all over the country, even though elsewhere it took less obvious forms.

^^^^^^^^^^TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: THEMES

1. PREJUDICE

The title of the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a key to some themes of the novel. The title is first explained in Chapter 10, at the time that Scout and Jem Finch have just received air rifles for Christmas. Atticus tells his children that it is a sin to shoot a mockingbird. Later Miss Maudie explains to the children what Atticus meant: Mockingbirds are harmless creatures who do nothing but sing for our enjoyment. Therefore, it is very wrong to harm them.

It is easy to see that the "mockingbird" in this story is Tom Robinson--a harmless man who becomes a victim of racial prejudice. Like the mockingbird, Tom has never done wrong to anyone. Even the jurors who sentence him to death have nothing personal against him. They find him guilty mostly because they feel that to take the word of a black man over two whites would threaten the system they live under, the system of segregation. Tom himself is guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is possible that the mockingbird of the title has more than one meaning. Today mockingbirds live in many northern states, but only a few decades ago mockingbirds lived principally in the southeastern United States. Like the mint julep or the song "Dixie," the mockingbird symbolized the southern way of life--a culture that emphasized good manners, family background, and a relaxed, unhurried pace of living. Unfortunately, another aspect of this way of life was racial segregation, a system that had been tolerated for decades by many southerners who knew in their hearts that it was morally wrong.

By the time this novel was written perceptive southerners could see that the opportunity for them to take the lead in ending segregation was already past. The civil rights movement, led by blacks and supported by whites in other parts of the country, was not only ending segregation, it was transforming the politics and class structure that southerners had taken for granted for decades.

To Kill a Mockingbird contains criticism of the prejudice and moral laziness that allowed Southern society to have a double standard of justice. The novel also presents a somewhat optimistic view of white Southerners that was somewhat unusual at the time the novel appeared. The story indicates there are good human beings like Atticus Finch everywhere, even in the midst of a corrupt society. Even those who do wrong, the novel goes on to suggest, often act out of ignorance and weakness rather than a deliberate impulse to hurt others.

There are always a few readers who feel that the novel offers an overly optimistic and simplified view of human nature. On the other hand, the hopeful note it strikes may be one of the reasons for the book's great popularity. The author does not ignore the existence of evil in society, but she does suggest that human beings are born with a desire to do the right thing.

Although most readers think of To Kill a Mockingbird as a novel about racial prejudice, you will notice that the mockingbird theme does not apply only to victims of this form of discrimination. Boo Radley, the eccentric recluse, is another "harmless creature" who becomes a victim of cruelty. Here again, the author seems to be emphasizing the universality of human nature. Tom Robinson's problems may be bound up with the complex social problem of racial prejudice, but any neighborhood can have its Boo Radley, all but forgotten except as the subject of gossip and rumor.

2. END OF INNOCENCE

Another theme of the novel is the transition from innocence to experience. At the beginning of the story Scout's world is limited to the boundaries of her immediate neighborhood. She feels safe and secure, and totally confident that the way things are done in her home is not just the right way, but the only way. The arrival of Dill, who comes from a broken home and has lived in another state, gives Scout her first hint of a variety of experiences beyond her narrow horizons. Then, on her first day of school, she begins to discover that not everyone agrees that the way things are done in Maycomb, Alabama, is necessarily correct. She also learns that sometimes it is necessary to compromise in order to get along. Even though Scout's teacher's ideas about how to teach reading may be wrong, Scout must respect the teacher's authority. Her own father advises her to ignore the teacher's ban on reading at home, but to pretend to go along with the teacher's methods while in the classroom. This kind of social hypocrisy is new to Scout, and she is surprised to hear her very moral father advocating it.