Most people remember To Kill a Mockingbird as a story about Atticus Finch defending an innocent man. It is. But the novel is told through the eyes of his six-year-old daughter Scout, and that choice of narrator is the entire point. Harper Lee did not write a legal drama. She wrote a coming-of-age story in which the coming-of-age involves understanding that the adults around you will watch an innocent man die because of the color of his skin. Scout does not fully understand what she witnesses at Tom Robinson's trial. She understands that her father is fighting for something and that the town is angry at him for it. She understands that Boo Radley is not a monster. She understands that Mrs. Dubose is mean and also brave. Lee gives Scout enough comprehension to see the outline of injustice without the full sophistication to rationalize it away, and that partial understanding is what makes the novel devastating. Dr. Claudia Durst Johnson of the University of Alabama, in her study of the novel's social impact, has argued that Scout's child perspective prevents the reader from retreating into adult justifications for racial violence.

The Overalls Were Not a Costume

Scout wears overalls. She fights boys who insult her father. She asks questions that make adults uncomfortable and she does not understand why the questions are uncomfortable. Lee wrote Scout as a girl who has not yet learned the rules of Southern femininity, and that ignorance of the rules allows her to see things that the rule-followers cannot see. A 2019 study from Columbia University on moral reasoning in children found that children between ages five and eight demonstrate a form of ethical clarity that diminishes in adolescence as social conformity pressures increase. Scout sits exactly in that window. She can see that the trial is wrong because she has not yet learned the social scripts that would teach her to accept it.

She Walked Boo Radley Home and That Was Everything

The novel ends with Scout walking Boo Radley back to his house after he saves her life. She stands on his porch and sees her own neighborhood from his perspective. It is a small moment, quiet and unremarked upon, and it contains the entire moral philosophy of the book: to understand someone, you have to stand where they stand. Lee does not sentimentalize it. Scout just looks, and then she goes home. Scout Finch saw the world clearly before anyone taught her to look away. Learn about and chat with Scout Finch on HoloDream, where the childhood defender brings her fearless honesty to your conversation.