Being older than Scout, Jem tries to explain many things
to Scout including the Dewey Decimal System and entailments. He doesn't report them
correctly which reveals his immaturity:
When I asked Jem what entailment was, and Jem
described it as a condition of having your tail in a crack, I asked Atticus if Mr.
Cunningham would ever pay
us.
Jem is turning into a
sort of parent to Scout as most older siblings do. He is learning to help dictate
appropriate behavior which he does in the case of Walter Cunningham's altercation with
Scout:
I
stomped at him to chase him away, but Jem put out his hand and stopped me. He examined
Walter with an air of speculation. “Your daddy Mr. Walter Cunningham from Old
Sarum?”
Jem is growing
increasingly boastful and seemingly brave:
Jem seemed to have little fear of Boo Radley now
that Walter and I walked beside him. Indeed, Jem grew boastful: “I went all the way up
to the house once,” he said to
Walter.
Jem is a young man
bent on learning by experience, he is also an inquisitive mind that will spend time on
his own just thinking:
Atticus kept us in fits that evening, gravely
reading columns of print about a man who sat on a flagpole for no discernible reason,
which was reason enough for Jem to spend the following Saturday aloft in the treehouse.
Jem sat from after breakfast until sunset and would have remained overnight had not
Atticus severed his supply lines. I had spent most of the day climbing up and down,
running errands for him, providing him with literature, nourishment and water, and was
carrying him blankets for the night when Atticus said if I paid no attention to him, Jem
would come down. Atticus was
right.
Jem is a growing young
man with lots of room to go. But he certainly approaches his world and relationship with
Scout from the perspective that he's working on doing right and thinking about how
things should be done.
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