“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Atticus Finch tells Jem and Scout. For the Mocking Bird is a beautiful creature and sings only for you.
A long time its taken me to complete the reading of Harper Lees iconic novel - To Kill a Mocking Bird. So eloquently and beautifully written, with a story that works on so many levels today.
We see the story through Scouts eyes, a young girl, fast losing her innocence as a world of rights and wrongs play out before her and she slowly sees the world through the Mocking Birds eyes.
The Mocking Bird - symbolises the innocence of the characters who are derided, mocked and even killed just for being themselves, in a conformist society which fails to understand them. A society with deep seated prejudice towards them, for this is the way society behaves and heaven forbid if you step out side of the symmetry of the norm.
What strikes me so much about the book is its title - To Kill a Mocking Bird. Harper Lee could not have chosen a more brutal word. Yet nothing could be more from the truth, as both Boo and Tom are literally killed, no where to run, no one to hear them. Run over again and again, killed again and again.
Lately, I've been fascinated by the work of the Ralph Waldo Emerson. An essayist and lecturer, whose greatest works were concerned with Self Reliance and Individualism. Every person is unique he argued and his or her thoughts sacrosanct. Yet Man spends far too much of his time being brainwashed by outside influence and a conformist society to leave him incomplete and half the man he is. How true...sigh
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
A long time its taken me to complete the reading of Harper Lees iconic novel - To Kill a Mocking Bird. So eloquently and beautifully written, with a story that works on so many levels today.
We see the story through Scouts eyes, a young girl, fast losing her innocence as a world of rights and wrongs play out before her and she slowly sees the world through the Mocking Birds eyes.
The Mocking Bird - symbolises the innocence of the characters who are derided, mocked and even killed just for being themselves, in a conformist society which fails to understand them. A society with deep seated prejudice towards them, for this is the way society behaves and heaven forbid if you step out side of the symmetry of the norm.
What strikes me so much about the book is its title - To Kill a Mocking Bird. Harper Lee could not have chosen a more brutal word. Yet nothing could be more from the truth, as both Boo and Tom are literally killed, no where to run, no one to hear them. Run over again and again, killed again and again.
Lately, I've been fascinated by the work of the Ralph Waldo Emerson. An essayist and lecturer, whose greatest works were concerned with Self Reliance and Individualism. Every person is unique he argued and his or her thoughts sacrosanct. Yet Man spends far too much of his time being brainwashed by outside influence and a conformist society to leave him incomplete and half the man he is. How true...sigh
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Comments