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

Set in the town of Maycomb County, this novel describes the journey of two young kids growing up in a small-minded town, learning about the importance of innocence and the judgement that occurs within. The individuals of Maycomb are very similar, with the exception of Arthur “Boo” Radley, the town’s recluse. Boo Radley has never been seen outside, and as a result of this, the children in the town are frightened of him and make up rumors about the monstrous things he allegedly does. This leaves the individuals in the town curious as to if Boo Radley really is a “malevolent phantom” like everyone assumes that he is or if he is just misunderstood and harmless. In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Boo Radley is a saviour. This is

Boo Radley is a ‘malevolent phantom’ and a character that has been shaped by gossips and sustained by children’s imaginations. “Stephanie Crawford, a neighbourhood scold… said she woke up in the middle of the night and saw him looking straight through the window at her.” This dialogue is an example of the gossips and how the legend of Boo Radley developed, lies that persecute his innocence. Setting is used to develop Boo’s surroundings and to summon an eerie atmosphere giving Maycomb reason enough to reject and victimise him for being different. “…rain rotten shingles drooped… oak trees kept the sun away and the remains of a picket fence drunkenly guarded the front yard.” The Radley house has been established as a neglected, out of place and isolated home through Harper Lee’s use of connotative words. This evokes within the reader the same view of Boo as the rest of the town and allows us to understand where the misunderstanding comes from before we

But, Boo Radley is the person who left different kinds of presents for Scout and Jem and even decides to fix Jem’s pants for him. “Some tinfoil was sticking in a knot-hole just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun. I stood on tiptoe, hastily looked around once more, reached into the hole, and withdrew two pieces of chewing gum minus their outer wrappers.” (find page number). In this town of Maycomb, many people believe Boo Radley to be a scary, no one has seen him for years type of person. After doing these kind acts for the kids like giving them presents, he doesn’t seem so much like a threat to society. Near the beginning of the story, Harper Lee expresses the negative feelings of the people in the town of Maycomb toward Boo Radley, but as the story develops, these kids and some people in Maycomb realize he isn’t such a bad guy after all. “Why, we did. We stayed—’ Then whose blanket is that?’ ‘Blanket?’ ‘Yes ma’am, blanket. It isn’t ours.’ I looked down and found myself clutching a brown woolen blanket I was wearing around my shoulders, squaw-fashion.”...“Jem seemed to have lost his mind. He began pouring out our secrets right and left in total disregard for my safety if not for his own, omitting nothing, knot-hole, pants and all. …Mr. Nathan put cement in that tree, Atticus, an‘ he did it to stop us findin’ things—he’s crazy, I reckon, like

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

Gossip has been around for a long time as it is part of human nature. It can start a war, and it can also create bonds. In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird Boo Radley, Tom Robinson, and Miss Stephanie are affected by gossip, revealing that the mistreatment and judgement of others can be harmful towards people and things around them. While gossip is affecting Boo Radley, Tom Robinson, and Miss Stephanie, this is revealing what a town can do with gossip and how it can destroy others.

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the characters, Boo Radley, has a specific role. Boo Radley’s role shows us what effect rumors have on people, and how powerful rumors can be. In addition, it teaches us a moral of not believing every rumor that people pass on, because most of the time it's a lie. At the beginning of the book, Scout and Jem, two of the main characters, discuss the rumors that they heard about Boo, what he did, and his family. Boo does not have a positive reputation in his town. Boo doesn’t go out of his house very often , which leads people to make up rumors and spread these untruthful lies to the town. Harper Lee leaves us, the readers, without really knowing who Boo Radley is and whether or not these

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

In part one of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the reader is introduced to Scout, the narrator of the book, her family and other members of the community in which she lives. Scout and her older brother Jem are the children of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in Maycomb County, Alabama during the Great Depression. Scout and Jem meet Dill, a boy spending the summer with his Aunt Rachel. He is between Scout and Jem’s age and becomes a great friend and playmate. He, like Scout and Jem are enjoying the freedom of no school, using their imagination inventing, and playing games throughout the summer. Next door to Scout and Jem, lives a very curious individual whom they have never seen but heard rumors about. This individual has been kept isolated by his father because of some innocent pranks he was involved in over fifteen years ago. Arthur “Boo” Radley is a young man rumored to be root of all evil in the small town of Maycomb. Curiosity is a theme repeated throughout part one as the Scout, Jem, and Dill desire to know or learn more about life and Boo Radley.

That is when they took Boo home and locked him up in his own house. Some fifteen years later some neighbor saw a horrible deed. She saw Boo sitting in the living room just cutting up some magazines and when Mr. Radly walk in Boo took the scissors and stabbed him in the leg. Soon after Mrs. Radley came running out screaming, and police did not want to send the boy in jail, so he sent the boy to the room under the courthouse. He was taken back in his house some time later, but that was only when the court said he die from mold. It also did not help that the Radleys where a closed off and strange family in general in Maycomb. The family did not go to church and had there curtains pulled over the windows on Sunday too. Mr. Radly only came out to ‘work’ and buy what was need and Mrs. Radley was almost never seen, and they were just closed off and no one tried to get close. I also do not think they will meet Boo because Jem and Scout are scared of him. There is the rumor of what he looks like and that just sends chills done their bones. After all the kids thought he “was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrel and any cats he could catch, that’s why his

When autumn came around, Scout started thinking of how “... And Boo’s children needed him”(374). Scout started to realize how every gift Jem and her found in the knothole represented an event in their life. One night while Jem and Scout were walking from Scout’s school pageant, Bob Ewell ( a drunk that forced his daughter to accuse Tom Robinson) attacked the kids. A hero, most known as Boo Radley came to the rescue and saved them and took them home and made sure they got there safely. If it was not for Boo, the kids would have been killed that night.

The town’s fascination and center of gossip is Boo Radley. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the town lacks an understanding toward Boo Radley because they gossip and create rumors about him. Miss Stephanie Crawford, additionally known as the town gossip, is the main citizen of Maycomb who creates and spreads these rumors and gossip. “According to Miss Stephanie, Boo was sitting in the living room cutting some items from The Maycomb Tribune to paste in his scrapbook. His father entered the room.

Jagged facial scars, disgusting yellow teeth, big bug eyes and drool dripping from his mouth, were the rumors that were spread about a man that will later show his true self to the Finch children, as a kind and caring person. The small town of Maycomb, located in Alabama, is a town where everybody knows everybody business. It is a place where rumors are guaranteed to go around, rumors about a man named Arthur Radley. Arthur “Boo” Radley is not how everyone perceived him to be in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as shown through the town’s image of Boo, the foreshadowing taking place at the scene of Miss Maudie’s house catching fire, as well as the plot twist that takes place at the end of the book.

In today’s society, whenever there is something that people do not understand, they create an urban legend to try and explain it, such as aliens or the Illuminati. Nobody knows if these legends are true or not but most people believe it because it gives people a sense of fulfillment to have an explanation for everything. In “To Kill A Mockingbird” however, everything that could not be explained was pinned on Boo Radley. The adults in Maycomb County refused to talk about Boo Radley so the children made up rumors about him. They would say that “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” (Lee 13).

“I guess rumors are more exciting than the truth.”-Venus Williams. People spread rumors because they feel that it will interest them more than the truth. In some ways, creating rumors can give people a reason to for them to believe that something is more flared than what the actual truth is. In other words, this means that people elaborate and stretch the actual truth in a situation, rather than believing the astounding truth. Often times, this helps people compress the unknown, and fill in the gaps to the clues that don’t make sense. Not understanding the unknown is hard, and leads to people jumping to conclusions when they don't even know exactly what happened. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, rumors spread throughout the town creating stereotypes and changing many people’s once honorable reputation and unfairly forcing them to alter their way of life forever.