Today we talked about and listened
to a part of Chapter 1 on audio Cd.
Please do the following reading:
By Monday Chapter 2
By Tuesday Chapter 3
By Thursday Chapter 4
ALSO FINISH THE 5 CHAPTER 1 questions for Monday.
Analysis of chapter 1
The first chapter's emphasis on family history and stories within stories describes the rigid social ties that hold society together in the little town of Maycomb, Alabama, and the inescapable links that tie an individual to his or her family or clan. The book opens by mentioning how at age twelve, Jem broke his arm. The narrator notes that the remainder of the book will explain how this injury occurred, and the novel concludes with this event. From the outset, through historical analysis, the novel tries to conclude how “this particular situation” arose. The children's attempt to trace the main incident in the novel (Jem’s broken arm) back to its roots, leads them to wonder whether it all began when Dill first arrived in Maycomb and became their friend, or whether the real origins lie deeper in their ancestral history and the chance events that brought the Finch family to Maycomb. Their debate speaks to deeper fundamental issues on the nature of human good and evil, and the old "nature vs. nurture" debate. Dill, the new kid in town, represents an outside influence upon the children that affects them deeply, whereas the family history Scout recounts is a more inexorable pattern which existed long before the children were born. Atticus tells Jem and Scout that patterns of history, family, identity, and temperament, both new and old, help make an individual.
Scout narrates the book in the first person, but in the past tense. Her voice and viewpoint offer a glimpse of local events and personalities through the lens of childhood, which may not always grasp the entire story. She often looks up to Atticus, who always displays an upright, solidly moral response for his reactions to events. However, Scout’s voice often assumes a mature tone when she writes from a more distant time, speaking of the town and its people in the far-off past tense and offering explanations for outdated terms ("Mr. Radley 'bought cotton,' a polite term for doing nothing"). This narrative device allows the reader to understand more about some of the events that Scout recounts than the young narrator is completely aware of.
The Radley house is old, dark, closed-off, and uncivilized in contrast to the rest of the neighborhood: once white, it is now a slate-gray color, with rotten shingles, little sunlight, overgrown yards, and a closed door on Sundays. The Radleys are also differentiated from the community by their willful isolation from the usual patterns of social interaction, which causes the town to ostracize them and unreasonably turn the mysterious Boo into a scapegoat for any odd and unfortunate circumstances that occur. For instance, when various domesticated animals are mutilated and killed, townspeople still suspect Boo even after Crazy Addie is found guilty of this violence. This foreshadows the town's treatment of Tom Robinson later in the book - they will find him guilty despite rational evidence to the contrary.
Scout describes the Radleys' tendency to "keep to themselves" a "predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb's principle recreation, but worshipped at home." Her choice of the word "recreation" to describe church worship hints toward the townspeople's ethical hypocrisy, especially in its close conjunction with the idea of forgiveness, a major Christian virtue. Going to church may not guarantee that people will uphold the virtues of Christianity when worship is reduced to a social event and the laws of society have more bearing upon what is "forgivable" than the laws of the church. This idea is fleshed out in more detail in Chapter 24, in which women from Maycomb's Missionary Society display equal doses of religious "morality" and outright racist bigotry.
To the children, Boo is only what they have heard from popular legend, and interpreted in their own imaginations. Scout's retelling of Jem's description of Boo shows how her young mind could not yet distinguish between fact and fiction. Jem explains that Boo, "dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were blood-stained - if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off." The children's acceptance of such superstitions as the permanence of raw animal blood shows that they are equally susceptible to accepting the local gossip about the mysterious Boo, as evidenced by Scout's evaluation of Jem's description as "reasonable."
The childish perspective, however easily misled, is also shown in this chapter to probe closer toward truth than the adults are capable of. Dill's comment, "I'm little but I'm old," explains why his height seems disproportionate to his maturity, but also symbolically suggests that "little" people may have a wiser grasp on events than their elders. The physical representation of this facet of childhood is represented in Jem's daring rush into the Radleys' yard, in which he enters a space that has been fundamentally condemned by the entire town. The journey of this one individual against the mores of the entire group, though performed here in fear and on a dare, symbolically speaks toward events that will follow when Atticus defends Tom Robinson in court and Scout breaks up the threatening mob of townspeople. Dill tries to persuade the other two to "make him [Boo] come out" because "I'd like to see what he looks like." His desire for this "seeing" has symbolic relevance to the idea that children, who are as yet still somewhat innocent and uninfluenced by their society, have a desire to see things more truly than adults, and can be capable of understanding the fallacies of adult biases, prejudices, and false accusations.
