To Kill a Mockingbird
Kavita Brahmbhatt English Coursework: To Kill a Mockingbird In Chapter 10, Miss Maudie tells Scout: “Mocking birds, don’t do on e thing but make beautiful music for us to enjoy. ... That is why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. ... Miss Maudie is saying that the mockingbird comes to represent the idea of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy innocence. ... This connection between the novel’s title and its main theme is made explicit several times in the novel: after Tim Robinson is shot, Mr Underwood compares his death to the “senseless slaughter of songbirds” and at the end of the book Scout thinks that hurting Boo Radley would be like “shooting a mockingbird”. ... He is a mockingbird- just as other mockingbirds do not harm anyone but only “sings their hearts out for us”. ... Just like in chapter 30, Scout tells Atticus that killing Boo Radley would be “sort of like killing a mockingbird” Boo Radley didn’t have to do anything in aid of protecting the children or loving them in a different sort of way; but he knew deep inside that Scout and Jem believed in him and even thought to begin with Boo was a stranger to them, he became a human at the end which made him grateful and made him feel that even though he would spend his whole life inside the house.