The Painful Coming of Age

Ryan Zhu

Mrs. Bademan

Period 2

15 December 2017

The Painful Coming of Age

As two time national debate champion Sam Arneson once said, “True understanding can only be attained through maturity and coming of age.” To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee allows us to show the things that come with maturity and coming of age. The novel is set in a small Alabama town, called Maycomb, during the Great Depression and is centered around 2 siblings, Jem and Scout. Their father, Atticus, is a lawyer who defends a black man wrongfully accused of rape. The kids face many painful experiences across the book that just come with growing up in Maycomb. Throughout the novel, Lee utilizes Scout, Dill, and Jem’s coming of age to show the painful loss of innocence that comes with growing mature in Maycomb.

Lee writes the novel through the lens of Scout, an innocent young girl that lives in Maycomb. However, Scout suffers a loss of innocence after stopping a mob from attacking her father. She narrates, “I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed” (206).

Scout realizes that she just stopped a mob group that was about to attack and possibly kill her father. The loss of innocence occurs as Scout sees the hideous evil that many common people can do. She sees people that she recognizes and truly understands that the world is not just a good place but also an evil one. The pain caused by this loss of innocence is also shown as she realizes that not everyone is benevolent and that the intervention that night could have had serious repercussions on her and her family. Overall, Scout becomes more mature and realizes the horrors of the world, instead of just the positive part. Next, Lee writes about the loss of innocence that Dill experienced. Dill, a young boy that lives with his aunt, is exposed to true racism for the first time, causing a loss of innocence. Scout states, “Dill exhaled patiently. ‘I know all that, Scout. It was the way he said it made me sick, plain sick’” (266). Lee illustrates Dill’s sickness after watching how Mr. Gilmer treated Tom Robinson. Dill’s reaction causes the reader to empathize with him and understand racial prejudice. Not only is the treatment not just, but Dill also loses a bit of innocence