Examples Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee uses point of view to show that empathy is developed from maturity and experience.
The main protagonist Scout sees her neighbor Boo Radley as a malicious apparition. In the town of Maycomb where Scout and her family live there is rumor of a dangerous beast-like man called Boo Radley who lives near Scout and never leaves his home. Scout, Jem, and Dill are equally terrified of the Radley house and there are several rumors going around that the pecans from the Radley's tree are poisonous and that Boo watches people through their windows at night. None of the children had ever actually seen Boo Radley for themselves but they made up stories about Boo eating small rodents and they made up a role-play game about the

Scout begins to think, ¨Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough¨ (Lee 374). In the beginning of the story Scout looks down on her school teacher because she does not yet know Maycomb's customs, more specifically that a Cunningham will never borrow money from someone. Atticus tells her that her teacher is from Alabama where she had her own customs and wasn't raised in Maycomb like Scout was, suggesting that Atticus wants her to look from her teacher's point of view. However, Scout is not yet mature enough to think or care about her teacher's perspective. She first begins to show signs of maturity once she and Jem witness the racial injustice that colored people in Maycomb are forced to endure. When Scout sees how this cruelty is affecting Jem she begins to empathize with his feelings and realizes it isn't morally right for Tom to be treated this unfairly. This moment was the first sign of the sprouting of the seed of empathy within her heart. Later in the book when Scout is walking Boo Radley home