To kill a mocking bird

Аверьянова Екатерина   47 группа 4 курс.

  The stylistic analysis of the text “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

     Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American author best known for her 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Despite being her only published book, it led to Lee being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for her contribution to literature in 2007.

    The story depicts a court where the trial takes place at a moment. The process of old Bob Ewell’s daughter Mayella against Tom Robinson, the Negro who supposedly has raped her. The story builds around the speech of Tom’s defendant Atticus Finch whose daughter Jean Louise happened to be a narrator of the whole story. That gives us much more curious details about Atticus as the main person we pay attention to during the given extract. It is a great move that the narration is not from the first person because Atticuses speech is rich in complex sentences, phraseological turns. The author gives him an oratorical skill which reflects with the help of syntactical parallelism “some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity…, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others”, anaphora”…she persisted in breaking it. She persisted that her subsequent…”. And the most remarkable is the way that he draws the attention of the reader to what he finds important by using such emphatic move as interrogative sentences in monologue “What did she do?”, “What was the evidence of her offense? ” and to make his words as strong as they could to convince the judges the additional use of the verb “to be” is used “We do know in the part when Mr Ewell…”. We also can’t leave without any attention the single example of the irony in Atticuses speech “And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had an unmitigated temerity to feel sorry for s white woman” that is how he, a man 99.9 % assured in failure tries to break the ice of the jury’s confidence and author helps him with morphological repetition “…in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you, gentlemen, would go along with them…”  that is slightly remaking into anadiplosis “…on the assumption – the evil assumption - …an assumption one associates with minds…” and spiced with antithesis “…that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women… ”.Everything that was mentioned above is all about introduction and complication of the story.

   Moving further in his exposing speech we’re going through almost all paragraphs of the extract to find it’s climax. It comes as usual near the end of the given text and describes the most important, exiting and very tense moment, the moment of passing of sentence which begins with the narrator’s question “ What’d he say?” which emphasize the importance of the situation. The description of what happened next is brightly colored with metaphors like, “Atticus walk into the street, raise a riffle on his shoulder and pull the trigger…”, epithets “dreamlike quality”, ”Tailor’s voice… was tiny”, similes “…the jury return, moving like underwater swimmers”,  “…and it was like watching Atticus walk into the street…”, “and his shoulders jerked as if each “guilty” was a separate stab between them.”.

     What is up to me this extract is cut before the denouement of the whole story. Our text is open ended and we have the right to dream about the happy end of the story but unfortunately but the facts speaks for themselves and everyone of us brightly understands that not looking an all Atticuses talents and all his efforts to save Tom he’ll be sentenced and the victimization of the black people will last for a very long time afterwords.