

6) For Atticus the community of Maycomb is essentially a web of personal relationships. Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town.” (p. “He liked Maycomb,” the narrator tells us early in the novel, “he was Maycomb County born and bred he knew his people they knew him…. Analyzing that chapter, this lesson offers students the opportunity to develop a critical perspective on Atticus’s judgment and character.Īt the outset it is critical to emphasize how deeply embedded Atticus is in Maycomb. They might profitably have focused on chapter eleven, for there we learn that Atticus suffers from a moral blind spot, which prevents him from fully acknowledging his community’s racism. How could the character who was so enlightened in his original incarnation, set in the 1930s, become so bigoted in his second coming, set in the 1950s? Readers and critics scrutinized Mockingbird to see if the Atticus who defended Tom Robinson contained the seeds of the Atticus who twenty years later joined the Klan-like Citizens’ Council. Readers who found him to be an exemplar of tolerance and courage in To Kill a Mockingbird were shocked to hear him voice racist views in Watchman. The publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 focused considerable attention on the moral vision of Atticus Finch.

(Page numbers refer to the 1982 Grand Central Publishing paperback edition.)
#TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD CHARACTERS MRS DUBOSE SERIES#
ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.3 (Analyze how the author unfolds an analysis or series of ideas or events.).
