To Kill A Mockingbird Literary Analysis

When people say the common phrase that beauty is on the inside not on the outside, do you believe that they truly mean it? Physical attributes played a major role not only back a few decades ago, but also in our present day. The very first moment you lay your eyes on somebody, your mind is the one to initially determine whether or not we decide to bring that person into our lives. In the fictional novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, characters and symbolism are used to help demonstrate the theme of the novel that judging somebody solely on the words of others can be deceiving.

To commence, characters such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley were key elements in helping to exhibit the theme of the novel. The novel focuses around a rape trial, Tom Robinson being accused of raping a 19 year-old woman named Mayella Ewell. Tom being innocent isn’t even taken into consideration due to the fact that he’s a black man. Atticus Finch, a respected local lawyer takes on the case trying to make the jury look past the fact that Tom is black. To bespeak, Atticus states the following, directing it to the jury, “You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women- black or white. But this is the truth that applies to the human race and no particular race of men,” (273). Atticus made the jury aware of the fact that not all black men are dangerous, nor are they all the stereotypical black men that are