To Kill A Mockingbird: Themes

Themes:

• The coexistence of good and evil
• childhood innocence - people are good because they have never seen evil before
• adulthood - confronted evil - incorporated into their understanding of the world
• PERSPECTIVE
• Transition from innocence to experience 
• Threat of hatred, prejudice and ignorance on the innocent 

• Importance of moral education 
• development of children's moral education
• Sympathy and understanding - best way of teaching

• Social inequality 
• social status / hierarchy 
• townspeople, white trash, black community (despite abundance of admirable qualities)
• Irrational and destructive rigid social divisions 
• prejudice in human interaction 

Characterisation:

Atticus

- Moral voice

- Has experienced and understood evil without losing his faith in the human capacity for goodness

- Understands that people have good and bad qualities 

- Tolerance (see from their perspective)

- Trying to teach that it's possible to live with conscience without losing hope or becoming cynical

- The scenes at school provide a direct counterpoint to Atticus’s effective education of his children: Scout is frequently confronted with teachers who are either frustratingly unsympathetic to children’s needs or morally hypocritical.

- Atticus’s ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him an excellent teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational techniques that she learned in college makes her ineffective and even dangerous.

Motifs:

• Gothic
• referring to a style of fiction first popularised in eighteenth-century England, featuring supernatural occurrences, gloomy and haunted settings, full moons, etc. In this book it is presented through the unnatural snowfall, the fire that destroys Miss Maudie’s house, the children’s superstitions about Boo Radley, the mad dog that Atticus shoots, and the ominous night of the Halloween party on which Bob Ewell attacks the children. These elements, out of place in the normally quiet, predictable Maycomb, create tension in the novel and serve to foreshadow the troublesome events of the trial and its aftermath.
• Small-town life 
• Counterbalancing the Gothic motif of the story is the motif of old-fashioned, small-town values, which manifest themselves throughout the novel. This contrasts with the suspense and moral grandeur of the book. The slow-paced, good-natured feel of life in Maycomb is emphasised. There is deliberate juxtaposition of small-town values and Gothic images in order to examine more closely the forces of good and evil. The horror of the fire, for instance, is mitigated by the comforting scene of the people of Maycomb banding together to save Miss Maudie’s possessions. In contrast, Bob Ewell’s cowardly attack on the defenseless Scout, who is dressed like a giant ham for the school pageant, shows him to be unredeemably evil.

Symbols:

• Mockingbirds - innocence destroyed by evil - the mockingbird represents this idea of innocence and the characters who (are destroyed by) come(ing) into contact with evil 
• Representation in the book
• after Tom Robinson is shot, Mr. Underwood compares his death to “the senseless slaughter of songbirds,” 
• at the end of the book Scout thinks that hurting Boo Radley would be like “shootin’ a mockingbird.” 
• most important, Miss Maudie explains to Scout: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but . . . sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 
• That Jem and Scout’s last name is Finch (another type of small bird) indicates that they are particularly vulnerable in the racist world of Maycomb, which often treats the fragile innocence of childhood harshly.
• Boo Radley - the way the characters develop in their responses to his is pivotal - thus an important measurement of their development from innocence to moral
• At the beginning he is just a source of childhood superstition, as he leaves Jem and Scout presents and mends Jem’s pants, he gradually becomes increasingly and intriguingly real to them. 
• At the end of the novel, he becomes fully human to Scout, illustrating that she has developed into a sympathetic and understanding individual. 
• He's an intelligent child ruined by a cruel father, and thus one of the book’s most important mockingbirds
• Despite the pain that Boo has suffered, the purity of his heart rules his interaction with the children. In saving Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell, Boo proves the ultimate symbol of good.