Essays About Atticus In To Kill A Mockingbird

As for Atticus Finch, he is an American archetype, a just man who by sheer force of character (and with a little help from his eight-year-old daughter) can stare down a lynch mob.The qualities that he encourages in his children—fairness, integrity, responsibility, empathy—are bedrock American virtues.The book tells us what we want to believe about ourselves as a nation.

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In the fall I was going north to college, and on those muggy summer nights, with the humming of the pumps and the susurrus of katydids in my ears, I read a lot of Faulkner.

He was my literary god, fierce, remote, and immortal.

At important moments that could be emotional, he is strangely detached and distant.

For instance, when Tom is shot dead attempting to escape from prison camp, Atticus offers a terse, factual description of the event.

Simplification is usually the result of abstraction; precepts are a lot tidier than the messy lives of human beings.

Atticus, as portrayed in the novel, is more at ease dealing with principles than with people.Funny, happy, and written with unspectacular precision.” In my eyes, that was exactly what was wrong with it.To an 18-year-old under the spell of the South, the book seemed like a sugarcoated myth.Nuggets of unimpeachable wisdom drop regularly from his lips, making nearly every occasion a teaching moment.“Atticus speaks in snatches of dialogue,” said Allen Barra in a 2010 essay in is precisely this ability to tap into an American civic religion.Faulkner and other writers of the Southern Renaissance wrote from deep inside the culture and mythology of a place that might as well have been a separate nation, but the famed “tragic sense” of Southern literature—the very thing that gave Southern literature its power and authenticity—is absent from , all about the pranks and high jinks of a bunch of loveable kids.Lee sounds like a bemused anthropologist as she leads the reader through the folkways of her fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, circa 1935.He has never taken Bob Ewell seriously, even though Ewell—the father of the alleged rape victim—spits in his face and threatens to kill his children.By the standards of contemporary parents, Atticus is negligent to the point of culpability; he lets Scout and Jem roam freely, day and night.He was as different from Harper Lee as a bear is from a berry.One reviewer called “that rare literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves.