In American novelist Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist, Scout’s innocence keeps her from seeing how the real world truly is. Her lack of awareness gets her into trouble; she tries to defend a classmate by saying he cannot afford anything because of he does not have anything, which gets her punished. Scout’s ignorance is due to her age and bringing up and her thinking is not yet stricken with the idea of social class; so she is not fully alert to what social status is suppose to be. Just like Scout, a young girl named Alice is not aware of what is the world is really like. Alice’s innocence leads her to discover thoughts about herself and the world around her. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the author uses …show more content…
This quote is an example of a metaphor and personification. She compares the snow to a “white quilt” and says the snow tells the trees and fields to slumber till the next season, like a mother tells her children to sleep at night. This also contributes to Alice being stuck in the preoperational stage because Alice is imagining the snow is treating the forest as its own child. She believes that since the snow covers the ground, it has a purpose to the world around her. Alice’s mind has not fully developed and within what she observes in the world around her indicates she cannot determine what is imaginative and what is reality.
Alice shows how her imagination shapes her truth through the unusual occurrences she encounters with other characters. This notion is demonstrated when she comes across a garden bed and begins to “creatively” talk to the flowers, uttering, “‘O Tiger-lily,’ said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, ‘I WISH you could talk!’ ‘We can talk,’ said Tiger-lily” (168). Alice speaks to the Tiger-lily, wanting to be able to talk to it as if it was a real person. She notices how it “waves gracefully in the wind” and she assumes it is waving at her directly at her. When talking to the Tiger-lily, Alice’s subconscious mind is not fully aware why she is conversing with objects and animals that, in the normal world, would not talk back. Her
Jem and Scout, throughout “To Kill A Mockingbird,” learn to consider things from other people’s perspectives. Atticus, Jem and Scout’s father, says “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in” (Lee 39). They learn this through experiences with their neighbor Boo Radley as they mature beyond their years. At the beginning of the novel, Jem and Scout make fun of Boo and assume that all of the rumors going around about him are true. However, later on in the story the children grow an admiration for Boo and learn to understand him. As they matured, Jem and Scout naturally learned many life lessons of appreciation, respect, and courage
What it Means to Kill a Mocking Bird: an in depth analysis of the morals in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Matt Berman from Common Sense Media commented, “This richly textured novel, woven from the strands of small-town life, lets readers walk in the shoes of one fully realized character after another.” To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the major messages is identity. Harper Lee lets the people look into the perspectives and identity of some of the characters that make it seem very life-like. In the novel, many characters possess both admirable and dislikable qualities which are shown through their actions. With the nurturing of her father, Scout contains the charming qualities of being courage and mature for her age. The father that instilled these characteristics in Scout, is Atticus Finch. While dealing with the stressful case of Tom Robinson, Atticus maintains to keep the likable aspects of sympathy and strong will. The antagonist in this novel fighting against Tom Robinson is Bob Ewell. Bob Ewell has instilled, in him, the terrible qualities of cruelty and racism. These life-like characters that Harper Lee illustrates gives people a clear vision of who the characters portray.
Carroll suggests how simile exaggerates Alice’s inner child within society as she discovers her surroundings the moment she falls down the rabbit hole. Alice discovers a locked door behind a curtain but she can not unlock the door or fit through it. She overthinks of trying to find a way to get behind the door, “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin” (Carroll 5). Alice later blunts out that she also wishes she could “open like a telescope.” The telescope is a simile that obliges to Alice’s desire to remain a child as she is scared of the fact she has only been outside of her ordinary societal role for not to long. The telescope also can be represented that Alice has always been so blinded by her societal role. Carroll demonstrates the use of simile when Alice compares herself to the
Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Frank Baum’s Dorothy are two of the most well-known and well-loved heroines of all time. At first glance, both Alice and Dorothy appear to be rather accurate renditions of actual little girls who embark on their own adventures in strange and fantastical lands. However, closer scrutiny reveals that only one of these characters is a true portrayal of what a little girl is really like, while the other is but a fulfillment of what most girls would only dream of being like.
Morals are something that everyone has. In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the book is full of morally right people and morally wrong people. Jem is one of the most morally stable children in the book because he understands what is happening in his community around the time of Tom Robinson's trial and why it is wrong. He and I share some of the same morals and that is why I picked him as my character choice.
It’s interesting to see the ways different authors depict how a character matures. In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird we can easily see how she chose to do it. The novel is set in Alabama in the 1930’s, while black vs. white racism was a big issue and problem for many. Atticus is the father of Scout and Jem, young children who witness the discrimination first hand when their father, a white man, defends a black man in court. Lee does a great job developing the characters; especially the narrator, Jean Louise Finch (Scout). Scout’s thoughts, conversations, and actions, illustrate that she’s emotionally maturing from the innocent child that she was.
At the mention of the name Alice, one tends to usually think of the children’s stories by Lewis Carroll. Namely, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two classic works of children’s literature that for over a century have been read by children and adults alike. These two stories tell the tale of a young girl named Alice who finds herself in peculiar surroundings, where she encounters many different and unusual characters. Although Alice is at the centre of both stories, each tale is uniquely different in its purpose, characters and style.
Harper Lee is best known for writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel takes place during the depression in Alabama with the main character, Scout, viewing her lawyer father, Atticus, defending a wrongly accused black man of rape. The reader gets to understand Scout’s childhood view of this controversial situation. Scout’s character in to Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is really the author’s own life playing out in the novel, which is most likely why this novel is thought to be one of the best American Novels of the 20th century.
A father happily goes to church and sings all the hymns with a smile on his face. He later calls a white man a “nigger-lover”. A grandmother donates some her earnings everytime she attends church. The same grandmother snickers at a poor mother, telling a tale of how the woman gives men unconditional love for money. Both of these criminals go to church, which leads them and others to believe that they are absolute angels. In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, practically everyone is religious, poor, rich, white, and black alike. Harper Lee illustrates how everybody, even the nicest of people, could be truly devilish using word choice, characterization, and symbolism.
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll endures as one of the most iconic children 's books of all time. It remains one of the most ambiguous texts to decipher as Alice 's adventures in Wonderland have created endless critical debate as to whether we can deduce any true literary meaning, or moral implication from her journey down the rabbit hole. Alice 's station as a seven year old Victorian child creates an interesting construct within the novel as she attempts to navigate this magical parallel plain, yet retain her Victorian sensibilities and learn from experience as she encounters new creatures and life lessons. Therefore, this essay will focus on the debate as to whether Alice is the imaginatively playful child envisaged by the Romantics, or a Victorian child whose imagination has been stunted by her education and upbringing.
The Victorian Era was a time where not many ethical ideals and moral standards were sustained. Yet, it is also an Era in which modern society uses to make advancements in both humanity, and philosophy. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was a novelist who wrote pass his time. He wrote further in the future of the "common" Victorian Era. The ideology he presents in Alice in Wonderland is conducive to an individual attempting to bring attention to the deteriorating mental health and humane conditions in Victorian-Era England. Alice is representative of a normal child in everyday-Victorian England. This child, Alice, has not been exposed to the likes of diversity, but instead solidarity. The type of solidarity that is all too prevalent throughout the Victorian Era, primarily in the upbringing of children during this time. Children in Victorian Era England were taught to be followers of the norms already established by adults, and to ask no questions. These types of parameters placed restraints on children growing-up during this time; not only physical restraints, but also mental restraints, such as their imaginations'. Carroll was no stranger to this ideal or the likes of this concept; In fact, he constructed Alice in The Wonderland with this in mind, to defy the imaginative 'norm' of Victorian-Era England. He created a character that dreamt of falling down a rabbit hole into another universe. This dream or imagination becomes so vivid in his novel that the
“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. -Inception” (50 Dream Quotes). Carroll writes Through the Looking Glass based off of the dream concept. This novel is strange compared to most because of the dream Alice has. In the beginning, Alice is playing with her kittens. As she drifts off to sleep, Alice goes through the mirror and enters Looking Glass World. While there, Alice joins a chess game as a pawn. She continues across the board and meets all sorts of characters who help Alice in her journey to become Queen. She meets the Red Queen, White Queen, Humpty Dumpty, and White Knight in different squares throughout the game. When she reaches the honor of Queen, Alice is
'Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll seems a first a simple fairy tale, but in fact its meaning is a lot more profound. This novel criticizes the way children were brought up during the Victorian era. Carroll presents the readers with the complications these offspring must endure in order to develop their own personalities/egos, as they become adults. For Alice, Wonderland appears to be the perfect place to start this learning adventure. A way to understand her story is by compering it to the world as if being upside-down. Nothing in Wonderland seems to be they way it’s supposed to. The first lesson, Alice must learn in this peculiar journey through Wonderland is to achieve separation from the world around her and to stop identifying herself through others, in order to discover who she
Through the Looking-Glass is a children’s novel by Lewis Carroll. The novel was written in 1872 as a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The main character, Alice, is a lonely young girl with a wild imagination; she often forgets what is real and what is imagined. Alice lives in England during the Victorian era. In the novel, Alice falls asleep while playing a game of chess in the drawing room. Her dream takes her to the looking-glass world where chess pieces talk and poems are backwards. In Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll expresses identity development and maturation in Alice through the exploration of chess, control of her dreams, and poetry.