To Kill a Mockingbird

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” 

This is a quote from Harper Lee the author of the book To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s novel was one of the best-selling in the sixties decade. The messaged she conveyed through this book was that children are innocent and do not have the ability to recognize evil unless they are forced to experience it. Adults are the ones whom give the meaning to the concepts of prejudices and racism in society, which then is passed onto their children.

I did a rhetorical analysis of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird produced by Robert Mulligan, which he based on Harper Lee’s novel.To do the analysis of this movie I followed the narrative perspective. A narrative perspective is used to understand the underlying moral of the story argued in the text. It consists of the setting, characters, narrator and events. The story takes place from 1933 to 1935, in a town called Maycomb. It was a dull and boring town, nothing exciting seemed to ever happen there. Until the trail of an African American named Tom Robinson who was accused of rape of a white woman. The main characters of the movie was Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch, Mayella and Bob Ewell, and Tom Robinson. Scout is the daughter of Atticus and the little sister of Jem. She was also the narrator of the story. Jem is the typical American boy, not backing down from a dare and dreaming about playing football. Atticus is the father of Scout and Jem and a lawyer in Maycomb. He is a widower, who instilled in his children his strong morality and justice. He is also the lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson in the trial and is one of the few residents committed to racial equality. Mayella is the unhappy daughter of Bob Ewell whom he abused. During the Trial, she tried to play along with her father’s story of Tom beating and rapping her, but failed when the testimony did not link together. Bob Ewell was very racial and prejudice in the story and was represented as the dark side of the south. The last character, Tom Robinson, was the African American field hand accused of rape and was one of the movies “mockingbirds” who was a good person but destroyed by evil.

The major event of the movie was the trail of Tom Robinson. Everyone in the town was in the courtroom. White people were in the chairs on the bottom of the courtroom and the black people were on the balcony. But Atticus’s children was on the balcony with the African Americans. They did not care where they were watching the trial from, which shows that their morals were different from everyone else’s. During the trail we find out Tom was unable to move his left arm because of an accident that had happened. The testimony from the sheriff of Maycomb presented that Mayella bruises was from someone who was left handed. Atticus then had Mr. Ewell write his name which proved that he was left handed. At the end of the trial, the jury’s verdict was guilty. The evidence proved that Tom was not guilty, but because of the color of his skin he was seen as guilty. The movie To Kill a Mockingbird used characters and events to prove that teaching children good moral values can, to some extent, make the world a better place. Atticus was able to educate his children on good morals by presenting it through his actions with certain situations. During that time era it was common for people to be prejudice against African Americans, but Atticus exhibited to Scout and Jem that they were equal and deserved to be treated with the same respect as white people.