Boo Radley Locked Up

I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time... it’s because he wants to stay inside.'' This is the first step Jem and Scout take to understand Boo, as Jem realizes that, with all the hate going around in Maycomb, maybe Boo just wants to stay inside, away from society. From now on, the kids become less preoccupied with Boo as their, and the reader’s, perception of him changes. While Boo is still an other, he is no longer a monster and is now more of a mockingbird, an innocent neighbor trying to stay inside, away from the hate Jem and Scout are currently experiencing in

Boo Radley is portrayed as a crazy maniac due to the rumors spread about him and a trial he underwent as a teenager.(Scout) "So Jem received most of his information from Miss Stephanie Crawford, a neighborhood scold, who said she knew the whole thing. According to Miss Stephanie, Boo was sitting in the livingroom cutting some items from 'The Maycomb Tribune' to paste in his scrapbook. His father entered the room. As Mr. Radley passed by, Boo drove the scissors into his parent’s leg, pulled them out, wiped them on his pants, and resumed his activities."(pg 11)Scout and Jem look upon him with fear and suspicion from the stories that surround them from the time they were children. She gradually becomes aware that Boo is just lonely and wants

The community has ostracized Boo Radley from the community even though most people don’t know him. “Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows.” (Lee 5). This is how the community saw Boo Radley in the beginning of the book (Lee). This outlook of Boo has made everyone scared to even walk past his family’s house (Lee). At the end of the book Boo helps Scout and Jem out from an attack from Bob Ewell when they were on their way back home (Lee). After that event they look at Boo differently till the end of the story. This type of discrimination happens in today’s society still and in movies everyone has seen such as the “Sandlot”.

When the Flinch children moved into Maycomb bad rumors were spread about the Radley house, and soon the children were terrified of this “ghostly” neighbor. Little to their knowledge Boo Radley was not a scary mean person like they thought. Boo taught both Jem and Scout that you should not judge people based on what rumors say. For example, in the beginning of the novel Scout and Jem find a knothole in a tree, but when they kept going to the tree there was always something new, like someone had been putting presents for them in their. “I were trotting in our orbit one mild October afternoon when our knot-hole stopped us again. Something white was inside this time.” (page 79). Even though Boo knew that the kids were scared of him and that they believed the rumors he still put effort into making their day and giving them something. Another example was at the very end of the novel when Boo Radley saved Jem and Scouts life. At this moment Scout had a whole new respect for Boo because he wasn't what everyone said. He was better than that. “ A man was passing under it. The man was walking with the staccato steps of someone carrying a load too heavy for him. He was going around the corner. He was carrying jem. Jem’s arm was dangling crazily in front of him.”(page 352). That was Boo that was carrying Jem back to the Flinch house. Boo Radley saved their lives and Scout will never forget him and learned a valuable lesson

Scout’s child perspective on Boo Radley shows the loneliness in his home life. "Maybe he doesn't have anywhere to run off to..." (Lee, pg. 159) This conversation came up on why Boo cannot run away from home. Most people who run away from home, have a destination to go to. When Dill ran away, he instantly went to the Finch’s home. Dill has people to count on and Boo simply does not. He has no place to go and so he just stays in his home. The aftermath of the Bob Ewell’s murder indicates Boo’s social life afterwards. “... and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.” (Lee, pg. 278) Even though Boo cares about Scout, his lack of interaction with people prevents him from being close with people. Even though loneliness is what drives people to make friends, he simply is not used to people. In life people who are misunderstood because of the loneliness they have in their life and this applies to the life of Boo Radley. As his loneliness compels him to both reject social environments and to be caring to

They base their fear on rumors. Boo Radley is an innocent person. We first know that Boo has been misjudged when he leaves the gifts for the children. “We went home. Next morning the twine was where we had left it. When it was still there on the third day, Jem pocketed it. From then on, we considered everything we found in the knot-hole our property.” (79). This shows that he is a nice person. Boo also saved Jem and Scout from the attack in the woods by Mr. Ewell by killing Bob Ewell. “‘ Why there he is, Mr. Tate, he can tell you his name.’” (362). “‘Hey, Boo,’ I said.” (362). This shows that he cares for the children and wants to protect

His father said that he will watch him and make sure that he does not do anything bad. After a while Boo’s father had kept him locked up for about 15 years, and no one has ever seen him since he first got locked up. After that Boo started to go crazy, one day “Boo was sitting in the living room cutting some items from the Maycomb Tribune to paste into his scrapbook. His father entered the room. As Mr. Radley passed by, Boo drove the scissors into his parents leg, pulled them out, wiped them on his pants, and resumed his activities” (To Kill A Mockingbird 13). He had gone crazy for just being locked up in his house for about 15 years. Boo will most likely end up being locked up into his house for about another 5 more years. In the ending I believe that the kids will not meet Boo because they are to scared of him and that he is still locked up in his

Scout, Jem, and Dill work many summers to try to get Boo to come out of the Radley house for the first time in many years. Jem had been told many things about Boo in his short years in Maycomb, and he tells his sister Scout about the ‘monster’, saying, “Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time” (chap. 1). Jem’s ideas about Boo are very biased toward rumors that can be heard around Maycomb. This shows how Maycomb’s people often judge before they know, seeing as no one has seen Boo Radley in over twenty years and people are prejudiced to believing the unknown is always bad. Prejudice and rumors can often not be trusted and Boo Radley is no exception. After Miss Maudie’s house catches fire and half the town rushes outside to watch it burn, Atticus tells Scout, “someday you should thank him for covering you up” then Scout asks, “Thank Who?” And gets a response from Atticus, “Boo Radley. You were too busy looking at the fire, you didn’t even notice when he put the blanket around you” (chap. 8). Boo Radley is not really a bad person, he

Here, it shows that since the kids never saw Boo, he must be locked up and is not able to come outside. Another reason the kids think he is locked up is because the doors of the Radley place are always closed. The text says, “The doors of the Radley house were closed on weekdays as well as Sundays, and Mr. Radley’s boy was not seen again for fifteen years” (Lee 13). This shows, Boo is locked up because their doors were closed so no one would see that Boo was locked up, and he was not seen again. The third reason the kids think he is locked up is because he never came out of the house when Mr. Radley died. Instead, his older brother returned most likely to keep Boo locked up in the house. Boo’s older brother would not have come home if it were not for having to keep an eye on him. Next, the kids are scared. The first reason they are scared is because they say the Radley pecans that fall in the schoolyard will kill you if you eat them. The book says, “...but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you” (Lee 11). Here, it shows that they did not even touch the nuts, because they were so scared of anything that had to do with the Radley’s. One other reason they are scared is because

At the beginning of the story, Jem and Scout was young , childish and lacked the ability to see things from other's point of view. From the children's point-of-view, their most compelling neighbor is Boo Radley, a man that always stay in his house and none of them has ever seen. During the summer , they find Boo as a chracacter of their amusement. They sneak over to Boo house and get a peek at him. They also acting out an entire Radley family. "Jem parceled out our roles: I was Mrs. Radley, and all I had to do was come out andsweep the porch. Dill was old Mr. Radley: he walked up and down the sidewalk andcoughed when Jem spoke to him. Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went under the frontsteps and shrieked and howled from time to time"(chapter 4). Eventually , Atticus catch them and order

I predict that the kids will not meet Boo Radley. One reason they will not meet him is that he is locked up. He was locked away by his father, because of his troublesome gang. Boo’s gang locked a town member in the courthouse outhouse. For many, that was the last straw. They could not take anymore of the gang’s exasperating actions. The judge sentenced the gang to be sent to the state industrial school. Mr. Radley, a proud man, thought the sentence disgraceful. Instead, he decided to lock Boo inside the house as discipline. Also, the Radley family rarely goes out. Even before the incident, they rarely withdrew from their house. They kept their doors closed, all throughout the week. In Maycomb, having a closed door on Sunday is unheard of. The Radley family did not socialize either. Mr. Radley’s only response to the children’s morning greetings was a curt cough. The Radley house also had

Boo was extremely misunderstood. In chapter one, we find out that the entire neighborhood is afraid of Radley and his family. Everyone has made up stories about The Radleys. According to their neighbor, Miss Stephanie Crawford, he stabbed his dad with some scissors. In multiple chapters, Scout mentions that people have said that Boo eats wild animals. In chapter four, they mention that he bit off his mother’s fingers because he could not find any cats or squirrels to eat. Due to these stories about Boo, people wanted to kill him. Boo also never left his house. Scout’s brother Jem thought that Boo never left his house because his dad had him chained to the bed. While talking about misunderstanding people, Atticus hints at Boo and Walter Ewell. He tells her,

Mr Radley was ashamed of his son’s behaviour when he got into the wrong crowd as a youngster and punished him by locking him up. There is a lot of gossip around Maycomb about Boo and people blame him for any bad things that happen in the neighbourhood, ‘Any stealthy crimes committed in Maycomb were his work.’ Jem turns him into a monster, ‘his hands were blood-stained’, and ‘his eyes popped’. At the end of the novel however, we find that Boo is misunderstood, and gossip of the town’s folk has made him up to be a ‘malevolent phantom’. Scout tells us he is timid, he had, ‘the voice of a child afraid of the dark’.

Boo is like a monster to Dill, Jem and Scout throughout the beginning of the novel although once the children see that he leaves them gifts inside a knothole in the tree in between their houses. He is only seen on one occasion in the novel, although he is talked about many times because Scout and Jem take an interest in him once they start to find out who he really is as a person. Boo Radley never really left his house even when he could simply because

Jem and Scout saw Boo Radley as a frightening man who was a childish superstition based off of the rumors from the town. As the children grew up the stories about Boo Radley caused them to become more fascinated than frightened by Boo. The Radley house intrigued them to the point where they snuck into the backyard to try to make Boo leave his house but that resulted in the children thinking that every sound they heard was Boo coming for revenge. In the first chapters, Jem describes how they pictured Boo, which was, “…about six and a half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch that’s why his hands were bloodstained…”. Logically it is understood just by Jem’s description that the children had no relationship with Boo Radley other than