The Mockingbirds of Maycomb

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The Mockingbirds of Maycomb In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, a resident of Maycomb referred to as Ms. Maudie made the statement that killing a mockingbird is wrong because “ ‘mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy…that’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’ ” (90). Most simply put, Ms. Maudie is saying that it is wrong to kill an innocent creature that cannot protect itself, yet alone harm others. This statement found itself as the theme of the overall novel and moreover as a lesson to society as a whole. The characters in the novel that personify this so called “mockingbird” would Tom Robinson, an African-American man wrongly accused of rape, and Arthur “Boo” Radley, a grown man who was shunned by society and then locked within his own home upon his father’s wishes. Both of these static characters possess innocence in terms of wrongdoings and have only performed helpful deeds for those they came into contact with. With the novel being set in the Deep South and during the Great Depression, the minority groups like the African-Americans were subject to a large amount of discrimination; a key reason as to why Maycomb decided to imprison, and later kill, the mockingbird that Tom Robinson symbolized. Atticus described Tom according to Calpurnia’s accounts as an attendant of the First Purchase Church, a member of a family of clean folks (Lee 75), and it was later revealed that following an industrial accident, “his left arm was fully twelve inches shorter than his right, and hung dead at his side. It ended in a small shriveled hand… [and] it was no use to him” (Lee 186). After Tom was wrongly found guilty and began serving out his sentence, he showed his relation to the mockingbird yet again as he choose flight over fight during an exercise period in prison when he ran for freedom and attempted to escape over the prison fence.
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