In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, Author Harper Lee allows readers to follow a young girl and her older brother as they grow up and learn valuable life lessons. Over the course of the book the children, Jem and Scout, start to mature and become more developed characters. Throughout the book, Lee showed the many events that allowed for the characters to mature and become better people.
Six-year-old Scout and ten-year-old Jem live with their father, Atticus, in Maycomb County, Alabama. The kids live very normal lives that consist of going to school, playing with their friends, and getting in trouble. A majority of the trouble they get into has to do with their next-door neighbor whom ...view middle of the document...
He says to Scout “Scout, I think I’m beginning to understand something, I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley stayed shut up in his house all the time… it’s because he wants to stay inside.” (227). This shows how he grows in his understanding of others and acceptance that not everybody is the same and feels the same way about everything. As the story continues, his maturity is starting to rub off onto Scout.
Scout also begins to mature throughout the book. As the book starts, Scout is an innocent six-year-old who enjoys fallowing her brother around. She believes everything she hears, especially when it comes to the myths about Boo Radley. “Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall…he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch…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.” (13). Scout believes that this is what Boo looks like and is completely scared of him. If she is ever to see him she would run away. As the story continues, and she grows older and wiser, she realizes that all of those beliefs are wrong and says that if she was to see Boo, she would treat him just like anybody else. She says that if she is to see him she will treat him like she as seen him everyday of her life. “’Hidy do, Mr. Arthur,’ I would say, as if I had said it every afternoon of my life. ‘Evening, Jean Louise,” he would say as if he had said it every afternoon of his life…” (247). This quote shows that Scout...
