Chapter 22

Pg. 213

“Atticus-“said Jem bleakly.

He turned in the doorway. “What, son?”

“How could they do it, how could they?”

“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done

it before and they did it tonight and they’ll

do it again and when they do it – seems like

only children weep.”

This passage shows two different perspectives of right and wrong in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In the early 1900’s African American people were considered to be a lesser state than the rest of society, in this chapter we see the instinct of a child’s right and wrong oppose the rest of society’s perspective. The children of Maycomb know that what has happened is wrong but almost everyone else thinks that this is okay. The children want so badly to try and change what has happened but they have no possible way of doing that. Atticus’s view on this is that “We’ve made it this way for them, they might as well learn to cope with it.”

The way that Atticus speaks when he is talking to Jem looks like he has almost stopped caring about what happens because he knows he thinks he has no control anymore and has wasted his time. Atticus has tried so hard in past events to change other people’s perspectives but he cannot. This shows that it takes people to the point of something terrible happening to see what they have done, and in the novel this is what happens.