To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee: Character Analysis

Moshe Bensalmon December 15, 2014
To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Test
In To Kill a Mockingbird, the author, Harper Lee, uses Atticus to teach the reader a lesson. One of these lessons is that ‘most people are finally good when you finally see them’. The characters that the book focuses on with regards to this lesson are Bob Ewell, Mayella Ewell and Aunt Alexandra. Atticus keeps telling the children to look at other people as if they were in their shoes, which can mean that he wants the children to realize that people in general want to do good in the world. Even if they are doing the exact opposite, they have good intentions;
Once the trial starts, Bob is talked about much more. Once the trial started, Scout and Jem are trying to put Atticus’ lessons to use by trying to take a step in his footsteps, but to no avail. When Atticus says that most people are nice, he said most people. Just a few chapters before this, the novel says that he was trying to put himself in Bob’s shoes, and trying to see why he could be so mad at him after he had won the case, but he had no success. Atticus was just not able to understand Bob. This is why he said most people. He meant everyone besides Bob Ewell. Not only did Bob curse out Atticus after he had won the court case, he also attempted to murder both Scout and Jem as a form of revenge for Atticus making him look like a fool in court. It is very difficult to find a good side to Bob by the way he is portrayed in the novel. As well, Bob dies in the end. Harper Lee may have done this to show us that he never changed. She took away any thoughts the reader would have had that maybe one day Bob became a nice person. Instead, she makes him die; leaving no doubt that he died a bad
She seemed to be a mean, controlling person and she was trying to act like Scout and Jem’s parent, even though nobody asked or wanted her to be. She always sided with her grandson when he and Scout got into fights. She also scorned Scout for not acting ‘ladylike’ and that she did not fit in to the way of the women of the south at that time. This shows that she did have good intentions, but she was just raised the wrong way. She was controlling of scout because she believed that that was the correct way to raise a polite, proper southern lady. The problem with this was that she was not Scouts parents and it was not her responsibility to parents her niece. This also caused much confusion with Scout because Atticus was parenting her in one way, which was to leave her alone and let her discover who she is for herself, and then there was Alexandra who was trying to tell her the opposite. But Alexandra was always doing this for the best. All she wanted was for scout to have a future in the town of Maycomb and not to be the odd one out. She wanted scout to learn at a young age so that it wouldn’t be such a shock for her when she grew up and had to face the real world. This proves that Aunt Alexandra was a good person inside and had all the right intentions; no matter how annoying and controlling she seemed to