Boo Radley's Rumors In To Kill A Mockingbird

Boo Radley was an adult that was thought to believe that he stabbed his dad in the leg with scissors when he was a teenager. Scout, Jem, and Dill always feared him. The feared him so much, that they always cautioned whenever they crossed over to their house. They even made a dare that involved braveness and Boo Radley. ¨Well how'd you feel if you'd been shut up for a hundred years with nothin' but cats to eat?¨ But Boo isn’t is bad as he seems. First of all, it was uncertain, whether he actually stabbed his dad or not. Number 2, he’s been there for Scout. For example, he put the blanket around Scout, during the house fire of one of Scout’s neighbors. And how he saved Scout and Jem from

Boo is a very important character in the book, in fact, the novel opens with Scout and her interactions with Boo and is closed by it too. Scout learns about Boo though the gossip passed on through neighbors in the community. The stories are scary and many out of context, however, Scout doesn’t seem to notice this till after the trial. At the beginning of the book she plays a game that involves Boo, and she tries to torment him into coming out. When Scout describes Boo Radley she says, "People said 'Boo' Radley went out at night and peeped in people’s windows. That he breathed on flowers and they froze instantly. They said he committed little crimes in the night but not one ever saw him." This shows that Scout sees Boo as an object of fascination instead of a human being. She does not acknowledge that he has emotions or feelings, she just views him as a monster who does horrible things to people. Furthermore, we can learn that Boo is not a very loved or respected figure in the community due to his strange way of living. As the trial takes place Scout matures and her level of complex thinking increases, but it is not until October 24th that we see how her perception of Boo changes since in the trial she saw how badly they treated Tom Robinson and she directly connected it to Boo “I hugged him and said, “Yes, sir. Mr. Tate was right, it’d be sort of

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

In the book, Scout and Jem are inadvertently deceived about Boo Radley. Boo is a shut-in whose reclusive lifestyle is viciously commented on by the residents of Maycomb. The gossip spurs Scout’s and Jem’s fascination with Boo Radley and drives them to incorporate Boo into their games and activities.

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

As a teeanager I know that people gossip a lot all the time and sometimes we think we know someone ar that we understand the situation but we don’t. In the book it looks to me that just a small amount of people know who is Boo Radley most of the people just hard rumors about him. However in the end of the book after Boo saved her she understood that Boo is a good person and that you can’t believe

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

Boo Radley developed with his Almost unnoticeable interaction with Scout at the end of Chapter 8. Scout is watching Miss Maudie's house on fire and when atticus comes back he notices something. Scout is wrapped in a blanket that she didn't have when she left the house.Scout says that she stayed right where he told her to, in front of the Radley Place, but she and Jem saw Mr. Nathan fighting the fire. They Come to the conclusion that it must have been Boo who had put it on her. This would step up the interaction that boo had previously had with the children and now. This also contributes to the Children's Mystery regarding Boo Radley

On page 10 scout describes boo and what she thinks about Boo and says “ inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he went out a night when the moon was down , and peeped in windows.” Scout was basically telling us basic town rumors about Mr.Boo Radley. This proves my thesis because people were saying all these things, making them up and don’t even know him. But , on page 362 ; Little Scout describes seeing him from her thoughts she narrates : “His lip parted into a timid smile and our neighbor’s image blurred with my svaden tears ‘ Hey Boo ‘ I said. At this time scout was realizing that Boo Radley saved her and Jem. This quote proves my thesis because everyone thought this man was a crazy monster and he saved two children

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

did not allow anyone to visit him or have the slightest contact with him. Eventually Boo's mental state triggers him to stabbed his father with a pair of scissors. Boo's fathers causes Boo to suffer innocently by stealing his childhood experiences away from him. This indicates that Boo is a mockingbird because he did very little to deserve this torment and isolation that his father inflicted upon him. Then, Jem and Scout from the beginning of the story never fully understood Boo's past life at all, yet they judged him on things they hear about. They suspect he was basically an evil monster that never comes out of his house. Scout starts the stereotyping by creating a nickname “Boo” for the innocent Arthur Radley. This nickname robs Arthur of his true name and identity, causing him to suffer. Furthermore, Jem and Scout constantly pester Boo in an attempt to discover his actual identity. They tell their best friend Dill that Boo is like a zombie. Jem describes Boo as being: “About six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cat 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 and he drooled most of the time” (Lee 13). The stereotypical image created by Jem completely robs Boo