To Kill A Mockingbird

23 Pages 5720 Words

Chapter 1: To Kill a Mockingbird begins, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow…When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out" (9). Only after one finishes Mockingbird does the significance of Jem's broken arm become apparent. How did it happen? Harper Lee refers to the subject only one other time at the end of the book, turning her attention instead to describing the setting and introducing her main characters. Through six-year old Scout, her narrator, Lee draws an affectionate and detailed portrait of Maycomb, Alabama, a small, sleepy, depression-era town. She writes, "People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County" (11). In chapter one we meet Atticus, Scout's father, who left his home, Finch's Landing, down the river from Maycomb, to study law in Mobile, Alabama. Atticus returned to Maycomb to practice law and help his brother, Jack, through medical school. About Atticus, Scout relates, "He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, and they knew him, and because of [his father's] industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town" (11). We meet Calpurnia, the Finch's housekeeper who Scout describes as "all angles and bones…her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard" (12). Scout, opinionated and vocal, faced Calpurnia's disci...