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To Kill A Mocking Bird The Narrator of the story is Scout Finch, a five year old girl who lives in a small southern town called Maycomb, Alabama. She lives with her older brother Jem, and her father Atticus, and the black family cook, Calpurnia. Atticus is a well-liked man in the This summer, her and her brother found a new kid in town named Dill Harris, who would spend summers next door at his aunts house. During most of the summer, Jem, Scout, and Dill play in a small area near their homes. A large part of the first chapter deals with the Radley house, this house is the topic of gossip and talk among the residents of Maycomb. Mr.
Radley's son, Arthur (known to the children as boo) had gotten into some trouble with the law when he was a boy, and since that time Mr. Radley has kept the boy within the house instead of sending him away to a special school. The boy has never been seen in fifteen years since the incident, and rumor has it that boo has done even more horrible things since he has been kept in the house. One gossip in the town who has been spreading these nasty rumors is Stephanie Crawford. One day Dill dares Jem to run up to the house and touch it, and Jem accepts. When Dill, Scout, and Jem are watching from a distance they think they see a shutter move.
At the end of the summer Dill returned home. On Scouts first day of school her teacher tells her that she should stop learning how to read and write from her father because it will interfere with what she is learning at school, and later on before lunch a poor country boy named Walter Cunningham had no food with him so the teacher tried to give him some money for lunch, but he wouldn't accept it. When Scout tried to explain to the teacher why he wouldn't accept the money, the teacher told scout to stand in the corner, and hit At lunch Scout found Walter and tried to beat him up, but Jem stopped her, and insisted that Walter joined them for lunch at their house, and he accepted. That night Scout talked with her father hoping that he would allow her to stay home from school so he could teach her, but Atticus bargained with her and said that if she would keep going to school they could keep reading the same as they always did, and she agreed. Since Scout is in the first grade, she gets out of school a half hour earlier than her brother, and one day when she is walking home from school by the Radley house she finds some gum in a knothole in a tree on the property and she takes it. When her brother came home he made her spit out the gum, and told her not to eat anything she found on the Radley property cause it could be poison.
Two days after the last day of school Dill arrived next door for the summer. Dill, Jem, and Scout decide to play a little game based on a rumor going around about Boo Radley that he stabbed his father with a pair of scissors. The group acts out this scene every day until Atticus catches them and takes After Atticus took the scissors away, Jem and Dill would keep playing the game without the scissors, but Scout stopped playing with them for a while, and became friendly with a neighbor, Miss Maudie Atkinson. Miss Maudie grew up with Atticus's brother, Jack. They would both sit on Miss Maudie's porch and talk. One day Scout and Miss Maudie have a talk about Boo Radley, and Miss Maudie has a totally different attitude about the Radley family than most of the town because she could remember that when Arthur was small he had been nice to her.
Miss Maudie always denies the nasty rumors about boo, and called the Radley house a sad place. The day after, Dill, and Jem tried to drop a note into the Radley house using a fishing pole, and while they are doing this Atticus warns them that they should just leave the Radley's alone. In spite of the warning that Atticus gave to Dill and Jem, the two boys could not help themselves, and on the night before Dill was to return home, they decided that they would sneak onto the Radley property, and try to peek through one of the windows. When Scout heard about the plan she did not want to go along but when Jem put her on the spot she decided to go along. When the three of them were trying to look through a window, they saw the shadow of someone passing by, and as they are trying to escape through the back fence, they hear a shotgun go off. They manage to escape, however Jem's pants had gotten stuck on the fence so he had to return for them later that night.
School started again, and one afternoon Jem told Scout that when he went back to the Radley place to get his pants they had been hung out over the fence, and that someone had fixed the tear he had gotten from the fence. After this Jem, and Scout started finding more items in the tree where scout found the chewing gum. These items included a ball of twine, two soap dolls, and an old watch. One day when they decided that they should give something back to whoever was giving them these items in return so they wrote a thank you note, but when they went to place it in the tree, they found that the hole had been filled with cement. Boo's brother said that he filled the hole because that was the only way to keep the tree from dying, but when Atticus came home he said that the tree was fine. When Jem realized that Boo's brother sealed the tree because he didn't want Boo to have this special contact with the outside world he cried because he thought it was simply cruel.
One night during the winter it snowed in Maycomb, and this was very exciting for the children especially Scout, because she had never seen snow before in her life because the winters were usually very mild in Maycomb. Since the night was so cold, everyone had a fire burning in there house, and Miss Maudie's house set on fire. For safety everyone near by left their homes and had to stay outside in the cold, and while Scout is paying attention to the fire, someone slips a blanket over her shoulders. Later on Jem, and Atticus realized that it had been Boo who must have given Scout the Blanket. When Scout realizes it she is scared about Boo even touching her, but when Jem finds out he is more worried about what Nathan would do if he found out that Boo had given her the blanket. They decide to keep what happened to themselves, and keep the blanket.
The children noticed that Miss Maudie was not too anguished by the loss of her house, and that she looked at it as more One day when Scout is in the schoolyard, a boy named Cecil Jacobs told everyone that Scout's Dad defends niggers. The next day Scout is itching to fight Cecil but she remembers what her father told her and instead she goes home and asks Atticus what Cecil meant when he said that, and her father told her that he was defending Tom Robinson, a black man. He explained to the children how morally important the case was to him, and that they should try to ignore any talk that they hear. Even members of the Finch family call Atticus a nigger lover, and believe that he is ruining the whole family. Scout responds to this talk the only way she knows how, by fighting.
In this chapter a mad dog is running down the block one day, and Atticus has to shoot it. This is an important event in the story because it shows a different side of Atticus, it shows that while he seems to be a simple and weak to his children, when he is called on to do something he is confident, and even may be seen as brave. When Atticus shoots the dog Jem, and Scout are both amazed, Jem is especially surprised and admires his father There is a mean old woman, Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, who lives near the Finch house, and she always screams at the children from her front porch about one thing or another that bothered her about them that day.
The children hated her naturally because of this, but they never did anything about it until one day she made some nasty remarks about Atticus, and called him a nigger lover. On the way home that day, Jem ruined all of the woman's flowers. When Atticus found out about this he made Jem apologize, and told him he had to read to Mrs. Dubose every day for a month. While Jem is reading to her she often has fits that make Jem very nervous. Soon after this Mrs.
Dubose dies. After her death, Atticus explained to the children that she had been a morphine addict, and when she found out she was terminally ill she decided she wanted to kick the habit before she died. The reason Jem had to go over to read for her was to help distract her while she was having her fits. Atticus told Jem that he sent him to read because he wanted him to see that courage was not a man with a gun in his hand, it was something different. While Atticus is away at the state capital, Calpurnia takes the children to her church. There are many things that the children notice are different about the black church.
In church they had a collection for Helen Robinson, Tom's wife. Scout did not understand why Helen did not go to work, and the reverend explain...
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