автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу The essay for studying by Lukas: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Lukas
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Essays for studying
This book is written for the students who study a famous all over the world work, written by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
An essay contains basic facts from the writer’s biography, the plot of the bookTo Kill a Mockingbird is retold, and the main characters and ideas are characterized.
It is also shown how the book influenced the literary process and other writers.
To Kill a Mockingbird. Forever.
Why is the book, written 60 years ago about the events that happened 90 years ago in a patriarchal town Maycomb, the most remote part of Alabama, is still absorbing and inspiring a reader, remaining an unchangeable bestseller (for example, in Amazon’s top-100)?
The world has changed from the time of its creation. Digital and communications revolutions almost wiped out the white spots in geography, as well as in private lives. It is not easy to find patriarchal principles now.
But there are still in a human world Mockingbirds and Mad Dogs. Everything that happens when they meet bothers people even nowadays.
This book was published on 11 July 1960 and since then it has been translated into 50 languages and had an addition of more than 40 million copies, an author became a millionaire, and it has stayed in the 10 most significant books of the 20th century according to various ratings and lists. Historians and sociologists named the year 1960 as “the year of Africa and the USA” as it was marked by an increase of racial conflicts that were expressed in the works of American writers and in a rip-roaring triumph of To Kill a Mockingbird.
In 1961, in just a year after To Kill a Mockingbird had been published, Harper Lee won the Pulitzer for it. Hollywood shared a general excitement about the book, in 1962 the film with the same name appeared on the screens gaining not less love and popularity than the original book. The main role of the lawyer Atticus Finch played Gregory Peck, and he received Oscar and Golden Globe award for the role.
Atticus Finch holds the first position in a list of the most positive cinematographic characters of the 20th century made by the American Film Institute in 2003.
There is an interesting connection between the book and life. It is clear that Scout Finch is Harper’s alter ego (a similar detail — Harper is called Hell at home), and the main heroine’s childhood is very similar to the author’s childhood.
The name of the author’s father was Amasa Coleman Lee. He was also a lawyer, as well as an accountant, a newspaper editor and a politician — a member of the House of Representatives of the state. Amasa Lee had a similar situation when he defended two black men charged with murder. He lost, his clients were sentenced to death and hung. It was in 1919 and, presumably, he stopped his law practice after this fiasco. But unlike noble Atticus, a real lawyer Lee was a quite stereotyped white racist who supported segregating.
A future writer Truman Capote was a neighbour and childhood friend of Harper Lee. He can be recognized as a friend Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems that their childhood relations managed to grow together with them and form a professional cooperation. It is a known fact that Lee took part in the preparation of Capote’s book, Cold Blood, and Capote kept saying that he had inspired Lee in every possible way to write (it was a hard process for her; she had been sitting for hours in front of a blank page) and even “organized money” (convinced some wealthy friends to make her such a gift) she had for a living while she was finishing the first variant of a novel (it started with several separate scenes written from her childhood memories.)
Generally, the idea to “rewrite” an unhappy childhood is rather therapeutic. It’s unlikely that Harper Lee suffered so much that she could not write anything. Why would she waste herself on other books if she wrote her main one? It would only make sense providing she enjoyed the process of writing, that she enjoyed it on its own. Apparently, it is not like this…
Probably, that is why the narration style of the author is so original: the story is told by a heroine, eight-year-old Jean Louise, and all the events are shown through the perception of a child — busy, observant, with independent judgment, an ordinary naive child.
From time to time, casually interrupting the girl, a grown-up Jean Louise — a clever, mischievous woman who clearly did not lose her independent judgment, joins the story. This “flexible” angle sight allows the writer, without applying to the worn out modern novel method of “different narrators”, to go outside the framework of the child’s perception and, at the same time, to talk about the most serious and amusing things, preserving the charming ingenuousness.
Besides, the novel has wonderful sketches of the provincial life that could be independent novellas. Let us just mention a story about a rare event in the life of south Maycomb — a snowfall that Jean Louise saw for the first time.
With special sympathy and love, H. Lee describes black citizens in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. There are no bad or evil people — on the contrary, she gives an impression that all the evil things and injustice happen because of the white people. This fact allowed some American theorists of literature to see “peculiar to many white writers of America and not always justified idealization of African Americans and their natural kindness” and to name this tendency “the black racism of white southern writers”. However, this definition may be disputed from the writer’s position, clearly expressed in the novel: all people are born to be free and with equal rights regardless of skin colour, to defend diminished and aggrieved is a task for real people and there are many of them.
The father of Jean Louise and Jem — Atticus Finch, a lawyer and the main character of the narration, makes this novel a book for adults.
But if you look at his appearance and actions, there is nothing from a superhero. He is a calm overweight widower in his late 40s, always a little tired, sitting in his armchair in the evenings with a newspaper or a book, “unable to do anything” compared to other fathers as his daughter sadly commented. However, introducing her father to readers, Jean Louise says shortly and clearly: “Jem and I thought our father was not bad: he played with us, read to us and was always polite and fair.”
Actually, Atticus Finch is a kind of people who, clearly because of a great number of substitutes, are usually called “true”.
He is endowed with the highest qualities of mind and heart, and at the same time — here the artistry and artistic limits of Harper Lee are tested — the reader is not oppressed by it at all. We quickly feel drawn to Atticus and sympathize with his fate, full of vicissitudes and surprises (mostly unpleasant), of a father of two cutest offsprings that have too much energy and imagination.
Only once Atticus had to shoot a rifle — there was a mad dog in the street, and at that moment it was found, that in spite of bad sight, Finch used to be the best shooter in the town. Only once in his professional life, Atticus Finch agreed on a case with almost no chance for success, and he knew it would make worried not only him but his children as well. He did not look for this experience nor he avoided it.
Atticus has never in his life said any splendid or demagogic phrase. When he convinced his children with something or answered their tricky questions, he appealed to rather parodic, dry legal style. And when he delivers his speech in the court, having destroyed completely the version, built by the prosecutors of Tom Robinson, there are also no loud words, no intention to move to pity and no escalating of emotions. He states and compares the facts, appeals to a common sense of the jury, reminds them about the equality of everyone under the law, and asks to do their duty in good conscience. The jury, consisting mainly of local gloomy and desperate because of the Great Depression (the action is set in the mid 30s) farmers, cannot imagine how it is possible to believe a “nigger” and not to believe a white person, no matter what kind of person he is, and find Tom Robinson guilty. Later he is killed in prison during his attempt to escape, he failed to wait till the result of a notice of appeal, that had been given by Finch, because he did not believe in a possible successful result of his case. And yet, Finch’s speech, his calm laconic courage gave some results. It turns out the jury was not unanimous, they had been arguing for many hours — unprecedented fact for such kind of cases in the southern state. The memory of this unfairness stayed in the hearts of many citizens of Maycomb. Others will eventually draw their own conclusions.
Atticus Finch just did not avoid his civil, human and professional duty. He completely fulfilled this duty without any inside compromises because, during his whole life, he despised “douchebags” (and passed this feeling to his children) that do not recognize a black as a person, always ready to deceive and abuse him. Finch did not look for a chance to boast of his courage. However, when the night before hearing, he was told that Robinson, locked in a small prison of Maycomb, was in danger of lynching, Atticus took a lamp with a long cord, a book, and a chair from his office, he attached the lamp above the prison’s door and settled down to read. Old broken “fords” with the lynchers actually arrived. The conversation between Atticus and gloomy farmers, who had nipped up to be courageous, was not going to end well, and everything could have ended up sadly if guys did not appear dramatically… Next morning during his breakfast, Atticus is philosophical about this incident and says that no matter what happens, any crowd consists of people. He says another sententiosity at the last page of the book, while putting his daughter to bed, at the very tragic night when Bob Ewell, the prosecutor of Tom Robinson, who had not excused Atticus for shaming him during the court hearing, nearly killed both children, and left Jem injured for the rest of his life: “Almost all the people are nice when you understand them at last.”
A number of nice people here is clearly set too high, although a bright-eyed idealism is not peculiar to Atticus Finch, a man who has thought through a lot and is not afraid of the truth. The author herself makes necessary amendments in her character’s speech. Or rather, the amendments appear inevitably from the content of a novel.
Atticus Finch is not a rioter nor an outsider in his town, his district where five generations of Finches have been living, once wealthy landowners but now existing on rather limited earnings.
The fact that Atticus Finch, a calm, peaceful, easy-going, attentive neighbour, exemplar of tactfulness and tolerance, turned out to be some kind of an alien, shows how powerful wild prejudices and unintentional cruelty, still existing in lazy and idealistic, as it looks from the outside atmosphere, of the patriarchal town, can be. Dark traditions live secretly and ominously like an unhappy Radley family in their “cursed” house with shuttered windows. An ancient formula: “Niggers should know their place” turns out to be stronger than good neighbour relations, stronger than human decency, and stronger than the mind. Rather discreetly, without publicist comments, but with facts — important and small, seen with widely open unprejudiced eyes of a child — Harper Lee, from many other problems connected to a so-called “black issue” in the south of the USA, touches the main one. She shows how very ordinary people, not bad and even likeable people, because of sluggishness, ignorance, or simple cowardice participate criminally against humanity — racial discrimination.
The title of the book: To Kill a Mockingbird expresses the main author’s idea.
The mockingbird is an amusing and harmless bird, it does not damage crops, killing it is considered to a sin in Alabama. When an uncle gives Jean Louise and Jem air rifles as presents, the father, not really happy with these gifts, reminds them again about this hunter’s precept. There is a symbolic meaning here: not to kill a mockingbird means not to perform senseless cruel deeds. However, a moral code, that has been worked out constantly and noticeably during everyday life in the Finch family, is certainly much richer. It is based on a single principle — truth. Everybody in this family answers the questions more or less in details but always truthfully. Atticus has respectful, but at the same time disciplined and strict, relations with his daughter and son, that may seem a little queer but essentially very close and tender.
Younger Finches may know a little more than they are supposed to know according to their age. But it does not prevent them from staying pure, with a really childish view of life. Scout and Jem go to a local school where together with them barefoot and sometimes hungry children of unemployed and farmers study, play and fight at the school playground. The first school impressions of Jean Louise are sometimes amusing (it is very funny when a young helpless teacher, a “Dewey System” follower, reads fairy-tales to sceptical and more experienced in life first graders), and sometimes rather disturbing and grievous. The father understands perfectly well a sharp distinction between home and school and gives his daughter first lessons of how “to live with people” — in other words, how “to get into somebody’s skin and walk in it”. Sensitiveness, intellect, a playful and kind humour of the father, without softening unsolved contradictions of reality, help the children orientate themselves in it, solve their own moral problems by themselves. There is no didactics in the Finch’s house, people live here easily, argue and make it up, but Jean Louise and Jem gain such qualities as kind feelings, a clear head and a firm hand from the very childhood.
From the moment of novel’s publication, the writer had been living a sheltered life and rarely talked to the press. She used to say, “It is better to be silent…than deaf.” Harper Lee accepted honourable positions from various societies and universities but very occasionally spoke in public.
The second and last novel of the writer was published in 2015. The story of the novel Go Set the Watchman is set twenty years after the events, described in the first novel by Harper Lee. She started writing it in 1957, it was before she began working on To Kill a Mockingbird. However, some critics think that the novel was published for commercial purposes and is a rough copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Someone wrote that out of respect for the author this novel should not have been published.
For as long as Harper Lee was able, she had been living calmly and modestly in her small apartment in Manhattan, bought for royalty, and after the blood-stroke, she moved to live her last years in native Monroeville (a small provincial town in Alabama where the story, described in the book, happened) and “gave” herself into a local care home.
All the writer’s affairs were conducted by her sister Alice, who died in 2014 at the age of 104, since then Harper scarcely communicated with an outside world. Out of respect for her, the citizens of Monroeville did not discuss the details of her life with journalists.
After the author’s death in 2016, an owner of a small bookshop in Monroeville, where her books were sold, broke the silence.
“The world has lost a brilliant mind and a great writer. We will remember her for frankness, talent, and truths that she had given us, possibly, earlier than
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