Spring Final Exam
TKAM Essay Questions
Essay (A)
To kill a Mockingbird has always been widely considered as a growing up and coming of age story. The main character that is growing through the story is Scout Finch, who is about to turn six years old when the book begins and turned eight when the book ends. The book is about what she learns about the people and life over the course of two years. Scout learn three major lessons from the experience, she learns partly from Atticus and partly from herself.
The first lesson that Scout learned is that you won’t understand someone until you “put yourself in their shoes.” In fact, I think it took her the longest time to fully understand this lesson. The first part of novel mostly showed that Scout totally get this wrong. For example, across the street that Scout lives is the Radley's house, and there is a man who lives there but never come out named Arthur Radley, children in Maycomb always pictured him as a scary monster who will eat whatever he found around his house. However, over the course of the experiences such as Arthur mended Jem’s pants and secretly put a blanket on …show more content…
This lesson has a literal meaning. To be specific, when Atticus hand the air rifles to Scout and Jem, he said that they could shoot whatever birds they want except the mockingbirds, because mockingbirds don’t eat anyone’s crops or harm anything, all they do is make musics. More importantly, mockingbirds also has a metaphor meaning of innocence, weak, and unable to defend themselves, in which case, to kill a mockingbird means that to take advantages of someone who is weaker than you. I think Scout learn the deeper meaning of the lesson from Tom Robinson’s trial. Tom is not prepared to the evil that he encountered on the trail, he is vulnerable and weak towards the white racist community in Macomb, and as a result, he got “killed” just like a