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Theme Of Loneliness In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Perhaps your reputation is destroyed or maybe a lifetime of utter loneliness has taken its toll on you, is it any excuse for murder? In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell’s isolation leads her to fall for and advance on Tom Robinson, which results in her father, Bob Ewell seeing this as an opportunity to accuse Tom of raping his daughter and forcing her to lie in court. This false accusation can lead to a death penalty and Tom who is at a clear disadvantage due to his race doesn’t stand a chance. In the article written by Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost and Found, it reiterates the idea that our life experiences take part of who we are and partly shape us, but it is mainly up to ourselves to choose who we are. Three prominent themes in To Kill a Mockingbird are lost honor, loneliness as destruction, and will to survive. Bob Ewell barely had a shred of respect for anyone, and that is all he got in return. Everyone in Maycomb knew he was a man of no dignity, a man who lived in the town dump, without a care for his children. Atticus explains more about the Ewell’s to Scout, “It’s against the law, all right, and it’s certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don’t know any landowner around here who be grudges those children’s game their father can hit” (Lee 41). Despite living in the dump and having no job to support his children, he does not think once about them

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