To Kill a Mockingbird

Life is full of Trials

Terran Snyder

In society there are many generalities and stereotypes depending on one's race and even something as basic as their gender. These stereotypes can cause people to be irrational and absurd instead of remaining calm and reasonable. There are also cases in which children make their own sense of reality; this allows them to shield their minds. As they mature, have no choice but to accept the cruelties of the world. When you mature you are able to understand rather than remaining deluded into believing in fantasies, though some still do because they lack the want to see things in a sense of reality. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee demonstrates what it means to grow up and experience things for yourself as well as leaving your own fantasy world.

When someone grows up they emerge from a world filled with illusions and pretentious statements, and they start to see what they should and should not do. Jem shows this more than anyone in the book. He began to abandon the unspoken pact Jem and he had made with each other not to tell when he asked Atticus to ‘come here' (140) because Dill had ran away. Though it was not as much as Jem, Scout also grew up and started to think about what she was doing before or while she was doing it. Like when she had spoken to the men outside of the jail and she had started to wonder ‘what idiocy' she had ‘committed' (154). Another way they grew up was the fact that they come out of the world they had created in the backs of their minds and opened up to the world.

People often create a world of their own as a child because it was more ‘interesting' or less ‘dangerous', and despite many people growing out of that habit there are still those who choose to, or can not help but, stay in that fantasy. A prime example of someone who was unable to successfully ever grow up was Ms. Stephanie Crawford. She stretched the truth to make everything more interesting in her mind and to the people around her such as when she was talking about Boo. She had said that his head was ‘a skull' (13) watching her through her window. There are also those like Dill who stretched the truth to try and impress the two Finch children when he would say that he could ‘smell somebody' and be able to tell if and when they were ‘gonna die' (36). But despite those things there were people like Jem and Scout who, as they grew