Boo Radley is demonized at the beginning of the novel.
Scout merely exaggerates the town feelings towards him. With the following reputation,
it is unlikely anyone would want to move around in
society:
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.
We
are told that Boo had had a wayward youth, and that his religious father had confined
him to the house. Jem realises later in the novel that Boo’s confinement may be
voluntary; that he simply does not want to be part of the unjust society that the
children are just learning about:
I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo
Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time. It’s because he wants to stay
inside.
Scout realised that
the society of Maycomb was not a welcoming place for those ‘mockingbirds’ like Boo and
Tom Robinson. She realised that there are some who do good who are never
repaid:
Boo
was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch chain, a pair of good luck
pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree
what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me
sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment