Except from being a winner of a Pulitzer award, the story itself is very well applauded! Lee did a great job. The story is indeed enjoyable!
Except from being a winner of a Pulitzer award, the story itself is very well applauded! Lee did a great job. The story is indeed enjoyable!
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Betzen,
Harper Lee worked really closely with Capote on To Kill A Mockingbird. I was only implying that their relationship was...well, questionable. Capote was very obviously a homosexual, so I'm not saying they were romantically involved, but considering the fact that she really didn't write much more after Mockingbird, I just wonder if he didn't have a hand, however small, in the actual writing process behind the novel and getting her published. It pays to have friends in high places. Not saying that I don't believe Mockingbird was Harper's own work, but just that Capote may (or may not) have helped her out a bit, seeing as they were such good friends. I'm simply suggesting that he may have been a driving force behind the novel actually making it to where it is today.
"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
--Faulkner
moose gurl:
Thanks for the explanation. That's interesting to know.
Clearly, by your username.Originally Posted by Mockingbird_z
Am I the only one in the world who thinks this book is rubbish? She should have just sold the few pages with the courtcase. The interesting thing about this book is that Mayella Ewell is trapped and so are all the others suffering from the depression, but no, we get pointed out the bleeding obvious as if we were idiots, a metaphor which is stupid and has to be explained to us.
In Of Mice and Men, Candy shooting his dog is symbolic of the ending, but George doesn't say at the end: 'Oh don't worry it's like putting down your dog because he's essentially like an innocent animal'
I wouldn't say it's rubbish; it's an "inspiring" book with something of a juvenile sensibility, heavy-handed at times, but it does have its merits. It captures a time and place, and it is quite perceptive of the intricacies of childhood. Scout's voice is believable; the writing is smooth and adroit.
The book is shamelessly sentimental. This comes into conflict with its all-to-obvious "message", because what it's sentimental about is life in the segregated deep South in the 1930s! The fact that the school is all white is never commented upon, the black characters (there are only two) are happy domestic help and a polite, subservient black man. For a book written in 1960, it's not all that progressive; in fact, it can be argued that it defends segregation. It certainly never even dares mention black empowerment.
Harper Lee's novel is interesting for its "daddy fixation". Oh, the Freudian implications! Scout's father is godlike, the daddy-worship is utterly unrestrained. The fact that the only black man in the book is crippled-- hence non-threatening-- has some pretty fascinating and ugly implications too.
Scout's voice is irritating. Lee's clearly trying to get an 'innocent' narrator by using a child, but Scout is an adult recalling her childhood, therefore it sounds stupid.
Lee could have solved this by using 3rd person limited, enabling the reader to see through the eyes of the child but without having to deal with childish language.
I think it mediocre, and subject to Emperor's new Clothes syndrome because of its theme of racism, and the modern phobia of seeming racist. people seem to be afraid to criticize it, because that would make them seem racist, or regressive.
I also find it a rather fault on the American education system that they teach this book so widely. Why not teach a book by an African American instead? Some schools do, but Lee is more widely taught than Baldwin, or Morrison, or Richard Wright, yet is a far worse writer than any of these.
And yet when I say the same things about Proust and Joyce you cry boo.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
Perhaps one reason why the book is so popular is because people tend not to go beyond reading trash. A person who has been reading Nicholas Sparks all his life is bound to be in awe after reading To Kill A Mockingbird, just because it's far greater - though not great - than his usual reads.
Last edited by Verdel; 08-16-2008 at 03:21 AM.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Joyce and Proust are the two most radically original novelists of the 20th century. Harper lee borders on plagiarism from Mark Twain, and never transcends or outdoes him. Her characters are stereotyped and static, to the point that the child Scout shares the same opinions and thought process as the narrator Scout.
The point is that some books are sacred cows in our society and as such are considered immune from criticism. If one questions their placement in the canon then one's sense is drawn into question, not the books.
At the highest levels of literacy there is a class of people, to whom the correct opinion is worth more than a man's reasons for holding it. These pseudo intellectuals are very careful to align themselves with popular opinion, and to quash dissent when they find it. They will read a book, turn the pages, and turn their minds off. They already know that Proust or Joyce are the greatest, and they find what they've expected to find. These are your true passive readers, as truly as that term can be applied to the perusers of Harry Potter and Stephen King. Why, these men might have saved themselves the trouble and just read the criticism for all they learn of Joyce.
Bloom thinks that modern academia has been taken hostage by marxists, feminists, and the cult of cultural equivalence. I say that these men are the terrorists of art, the ones with their fingerprints on the knife, and the corpse still bleeding. It is their perverted aesthetic which is the yardstick of talent today. Originality indeed! As if to be different were somehow to be better. Shakespeare's not original. Dante's not original. Flaubert wasn't original. I'm not entirely sure on this point, but it doesn't seem unlikely to me that this emphasis on uniqueness is less a purely aesthetic value than a reaction against the rise of mass market genre fiction and elite art's struggle to define itself by what it is not.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
I heartily agree.
This book has always been characterized as 'a book about racism' when it clearly is not. Racism is one of the themes but I think everyone that believes that it is the main point of the book has completely missed the point. Even reading it for the first time at 10 years old I didn't think the themes were overly subtle, but apparently they were for a lot of people.
I loved everything about To Kill a Mockingbird - the themes, the characters, the setting, everything. But I think if you're looking for a single stabbing theme, you are sure to be disappointed.
Agree with you completely. Here in the UK it is just the same- instead of studying Chaucer, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickens, Shakespeare etc and being taught to take pride in the literary heritage of this island, at my sister's school the kids study 'multicultural poetry' (i.e free verse garbage by 3rd rate poets) with an added dose of guilt and shame at Britain's colonial past. I think Harold Bloom is quite right to accuse modern academia of having been hijacked by the politically correct, anti 'dead, white European' mob.
We were forced to do rubbish like that at school. It is the quality of writing and emotion that I find important in a novel, not whether it's political enough.
Its themes are hardly subtle- they're flagged up. Innocence. Prejudice. Hypocrisy. And Atticus is a preacher. His speech in the courtroom is so long and cliched that he might as well have sung 'Ebony and Ivory'
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