01.08.07

To Kill a Mocking Bird

Posted in Literature at 3:55 pm by Adam B.

I read this book on the plane coming home from visiting my family in Michigan. It was the first time that I had read it, although I am told I tried once before and I am sure that I should have read it in High School but didn’t. Of all the books I’ve read lately it was not my favorite, though I can understand its enduring value.

This book was written in 1960 and has some harsh criticisms of racism. The father in the book is a noble lawyer whose feelings about guns rival Macgyver and the narrator is his daughter, although I thought she was a boy until page 32. This book had a habit of tricking me into thinking I was reading about one thing when I was actually reading about something else; not that it was supposed to be that way, I’m sure. I just found myself frequently confused. I read one section three times before I figured out that it was referring to a guy peeing on his front lawn. By the end of the book I was used to the vague style so it hardly bothered me that it never actually said who killed the guy. And yes, I know what really happened… it was aliens.

The children in this work were innocence embodied and racism is a learned madness. In order to cope with the pervasive insanity one must appear insane to be different and yet left alone. This was wonderfully illustrated by the man who drank coca-cola out of a bag so that people would think he was a drunk and not bother him about living with blacks. The father/lawyer in the book was let off the hook by the people (though not completely) because he was a single dad doing the best he could. Time and time again he shows compassion mingled with wisdom and a determination to raise his kids straight in a crooked world. He is the hero who never goes looking for a fight but always finds himself in the middle of the action. If injustice is a white shirt he is the stain of justice that cannot be bleached out.

I have been happy to see that many classic works unashamedly exalt Christian values and even Christ himself, while offering criticisms of Christians in general. This even handed way of dealing with ideal Christianity vs. actual Christianity allows the gospel to be a key player in a novel without overpowering the reader with a three point presentation about sin, faith and the resurrection. In this book, as in many other, the church is a place of both forgiveness and prejudice, of persecution and of love. Such is the balance of law and gospel that we all must maintain. To know the difference between Good and Evil is to be like Adam (and Eve), to offer forgiveness in spite of that knowledge is to be like Christ. While innocence is used to accentuate and illuminate the problem of racism in this book it was not the innocence of children that made the difference but the wisdom of the father.  Our only hope is to move from the blissful shores of innocence, through the gates of knowledge and into the twin fields of wisdom and compassion if we hope to be like Christ.

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