Tuesday 18 April 2017

Where is Boo Radley's description located in To Kill a Mockingbird?

It is difficult to pinpoint specific page numbers for passages since so many different editions of this famous novel are now in print.  However, I can give you some chapters in which some descriptions of Boo Radley occur.  For example, Jem gives this very imaginative description in Chapter 1:


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...

It is difficult to pinpoint specific page numbers for passages since so many different editions of this famous novel are now in print.  However, I can give you some chapters in which some descriptions of Boo Radley occur.  For example, Jem gives this very imaginative description in Chapter 1:



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.



Of course, none of these descriptions turn out to be true.  These are primarily the fantasies of children and local tall tales.  As Jem, Scout, and Dill grow and mature, their perceptions of Boo Radley change and mature as well.  In Chapter 5, they decide to invite Boo out of the house by sending him a note on a fishing pole.  They are becoming empathetic to the "malevolent phantom" of the neighborhood, wondering what it must be like to be so secluded for so long.  After Tom Robinson's trial, Jem takes another step toward maturity and toward understanding Boo Radley when he says that perhaps Boo has not stayed inside all these years by force, but instead by choice.  Finally, in Chapter 29, the reader is treated to a description of the actual Arthur Radley:



His face was a white as his hands, but for a shadow in his jutting chin.  His cheeks were thin to hollowness; his mouth was wide; there were shallow, almost delicate indentations at his temples, and his gray eyes were so colorless I thought he was blind.  His hair was dead and thin, almost feathery on top of his head.



This description is so far removed from the one given in the first chapter that it is easy to see how much the children have grown in their ability to truly see others for who they are, not what the Maycomb gossips proclaim them to be.

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