To Kill a Mockingbird Essay

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Prejudice is very common in today’s society. It is everywhere and we don’t even realise it. Harper Lee shows many examples of prejudice in the book “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Harper Lee expresses these prejudices through the narrator being a young innocent girl, the characterisation, the plot by making Tom Robinson lose the trial, the setting being in a predominantly white town and the language used which is very disrespectful to black people.
Harper Lee uses one of the main characters in the book, Scout, to narrate the story. This gives us a better understanding of the story and the prejudices in it. Scout is an innocent 9 year old girl, Atticus’ daughter. Scout is narrating the story from an adult’s point of view. Scout becomes very good friends with Dill and pretends to ask him to marry her. Scout is always following Jem around and is very defensive over things that offend her. She is taught from Atticus to respect black people. After Scout had a run in with her teacher at school, where she was told that Atticus is teaching her all wrong, she took this to heart and it really upset her. When she got home Atticus told her “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view……until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. What Atticus means by this is that you should never just see things one sided and that you should always listen to other peoples opinion.
The plot has a lot of prejudice the whole way through it as well by the whole book being based around racism towards blacks and Tom Robinson in particular, and the isolation of the Raddleys. Tom Robinson is set up by Bob Ewell and Mayella Ewell by faking the rape and assault of Mayella and blaming it on Tom Robinson. There was no doctor at the trial which made it definite that Tom would be convicted just because he is black. With a doctor at the trial it would have been very easy to prove Tom’s innocence because of the problem with... [continues]

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