To Kill A Mockingbird Impact On American Culture
Few novels have had the sustained impact on American culture of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the most widely read works of American fiction, and perhaps one of the most beloved, it reached the 50th anniversary of its publication this summer. The novel has sold over 30 million copies in at least 40 languages, and between 50 and 70 percent of U.S. school systems continue to require students to read it.
Why does To Kill a Mockingbird continue to enthrall us? Perhaps because it presents complex social, ethical, and moral issues in a beguilingly simple, beautifully narrated form. This tale of Southern white children coming of age amid racism, violence, and various forms of abuse introduces these issues in a manner that all readers, …show more content…
Trying on someone else’s shoes is child’s play. Everyone has done that, and it’s a diversion with no consequences, much like the role-playing games the Finch children and their friend Dill enjoy on the front lawn. But climbing into someone else’s skin is quite another matter—it’s impossible. Atticus’s two metaphors are structured to underscore the difference between sympathizing with someone and appropriating his or her values, dreams, history, and experiences. The simple fact is that we cannot get into someone else’s skin, and it’s presumptuous and condescending to believe that we can. That’s something that Tom Robinson and Boo Radley know implicitly, and that the Finch children never fully …show more content…
It shows us not so much how particular things are alike, but how we can make them alike and how we establish the grounds that allow us to perceive similarity in the first place. To Kill a Mockingbird’s title metaphor illustrates the ways we often make others little more than slightly exotic versions of ourselves. Atticus explains, in the work’s most often cited phrase, that mockingbirds “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” and that’s why it’s a sin to kill them. But we recall that mockingbirds imitate the calls of other birds; they don’t sing their own songs. When we presume easy identification with other people, we assume that, like mockingbirds, they will sing our song, conform to our worldview, abandon their own unique voices, and sing in unison along with us—all for us to
Why does To Kill a Mockingbird continue to enthrall us? Perhaps because it presents complex social, ethical, and moral issues in a beguilingly simple, beautifully narrated form. This tale of Southern white children coming of age amid racism, violence, and various forms of abuse introduces these issues in a manner that all readers, …show more content…
Trying on someone else’s shoes is child’s play. Everyone has done that, and it’s a diversion with no consequences, much like the role-playing games the Finch children and their friend Dill enjoy on the front lawn. But climbing into someone else’s skin is quite another matter—it’s impossible. Atticus’s two metaphors are structured to underscore the difference between sympathizing with someone and appropriating his or her values, dreams, history, and experiences. The simple fact is that we cannot get into someone else’s skin, and it’s presumptuous and condescending to believe that we can. That’s something that Tom Robinson and Boo Radley know implicitly, and that the Finch children never fully …show more content…
It shows us not so much how particular things are alike, but how we can make them alike and how we establish the grounds that allow us to perceive similarity in the first place. To Kill a Mockingbird’s title metaphor illustrates the ways we often make others little more than slightly exotic versions of ourselves. Atticus explains, in the work’s most often cited phrase, that mockingbirds “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” and that’s why it’s a sin to kill them. But we recall that mockingbirds imitate the calls of other birds; they don’t sing their own songs. When we presume easy identification with other people, we assume that, like mockingbirds, they will sing our song, conform to our worldview, abandon their own unique voices, and sing in unison along with us—all for us to