What Does Jem Symbolize In To Kill A Mockingbird

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird” (Lee 117). In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, the mockingbird symbolizes innocence and the destruction of it. Throughout the book, many characters are representations of the bird as they are innocents who have fallen in the hands of injustice.
Boo Radley is a harmless man who was always accused of crimes he did not commit by almost every person in Maycomb. The man had allegedly stabbed his father with a pair of scissors, went to jail, and ate cats with his bare hands. In reality, Boo was just a recluse who
Unlike Boo Radley and Tom Robinson, who are the true Mockingbirds of the story, Jem is maturing into one. At the beginning of the book, Jem took part in games that mocked people like Boo Radley. In a fit of anger he even destroyed all of Mrs. Dubose's flowers. "He did not begin to calm down until he had cut the tops off of every camellia bush Mrs. Dubose owned, until the ground was littered with green buds and leaves," (Lee 137). After that fiasco, he read to Mrs. Dubose for a while and later found that he helped her overcome her morphine addiction before she died. On page 319, it states, "My hand was going down on him when Jem spoke. / … 'Why couldn't I mash him?' I asked. / 'Because they don't bother you,' Jem answered in the darkness" (Lee 319-320). In that quote, Scout was going to kill a Roly Poly right after she finished playing with it. Subsequent to witnessing Tom Robinson’s trial, Jem’s eyes were opened to the injustice in the world. Even though the Roly Poly so just a bug, Jem realized that it deserves to live because it had never done anything to harm Scout or anyone else. Jem is starting to symbolize the mockingbird because he is not going to harm anybody or anything that has not harmed