Essay On Atticus Finch

Whilst researching Atticus Finch I presumed I would find various articles revering him as a great man of principle, but quite contradictory, I mostly found articles criticising Atticus. I found this stance curious and it proved rather propitious for me, inspiring the idea of this essay. I shall endeavour to explore the faults of the two characters Sherlock Holmes and Atticus Finch and explain how this makes them interesting and complex characters. I will only refer to the Sherlock Holmes from the television program Elementary.

Atticus Finch was penned by Harper Lee in the novel To Kill A Mockingbird. He grew up in the south of America in the early 20th century and represented the state legislature for Maycomb County. Unable to conform to the present racial prejudices Atticus takes on the defense of a black man, Tom, in an alleged rape case of a white woman. The character Atticus Finch has been criticized by the New Yorker and other publishments for representing “naïve and simplistic moralism and for perpetuating the idea that a white man’s individual goodness and benevolence is an adequate answer to pervasive racial oppression”.

It is quite true
At times Atticus minimizes societal bigotry and even makes light of it; memorably, he dismisses the Ku Klux Klan in Maycomb County as a basically harmless "political organization" whose members could be shamed into dispersing when the Jewish store owner they were harassing reminded them that "he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs." In contradiction to this he treats societal bigotry as lower-class vulgarity or a bizarre mental affliction: he tells Scout off, for using a racial slur because "it’s common" and expresses bafflement that "reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up." He places a big emphasis on teaching Scout a white man is "trash," no matter what his background, if he mistreats a black