Atticus Finch as a Hero
"I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back
yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if
you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is not just a title of the story that depicts itself in its words (there is no such presence of a bird that has any such significance to the book. The meaning is applied to the key features of the novel, and the Mad Dog incident is a part of that. Atticus Finch describes to his children that shooting something that has no harm to anyone or anything, unlike pests and else what, is something that should not be done. A mockingbird just sits in a tree and sings and does not have any inflicted harm to anything else, so Atticus says it is a sin to shoot one for the sake of it. This meaning and concept has a lot of relevance to many such happenings in the novel; it is what the story is built/based around.
Tom Johnson is most definitely a mockingbird, as well as Boo Radley. They are both innocent, harmless individuals that haven’t done any bad deeds or harmed anyone. But yet they still get treated harshly and unfairly, like in Robinson’s trial, he was not guilty for the uncalled-for incident with Mayella, but he still got charged for it. Scout had called it ‘sin to do that’. So this concept of it being a sin to kill a harmless individual enforces the dividing line between good and bad roles in society, and that is why through reading the book we gather an understanding for who the bad people are in the society and the appropriate consequences for them.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is not just a title of the story that depicts itself in its words (there is no such presence of a bird that has any such significance to the book. The meaning is applied to the key features of the novel, and the Mad Dog incident is a part of that. Atticus Finch describes to his children that shooting something that has no harm to anyone or anything, unlike pests and else what, is something that should not be done. A mockingbird just sits in a tree and sings and does not have any inflicted harm to anything else, so Atticus says it is a sin to shoot one for the sake of it. This meaning and concept has a lot of relevance to many such happenings in the novel; it is what the story is built/based around.
Tom Johnson is most definitely a mockingbird, as well as Boo Radley. They are both innocent, harmless individuals that haven’t done any bad deeds or harmed anyone. But yet they still get treated harshly and unfairly, like in Robinson’s trial, he was not guilty for the uncalled-for incident with Mayella, but he still got charged for it. Scout had called it ‘sin to do that’. So this concept of it being a sin to kill a harmless individual enforces the dividing line between good and bad roles in society, and that is why through reading the book we gather an understanding for who the bad people are in the society and the appropriate consequences for them.