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Examples Of Foreshadow In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Harper Lee, a novelist during the 1960s, wrote To Kill a Mockingbird as a form of media to help boost the civil rights movement. The novel takes place in the 1920s during the Great Depression, following our main character Scout Finch as she matures and learns about the town surrounding her in Maycomb, Alabama. Scout is the daughter of a controversial white lawyer who defends a black man, Tom Robinson. Tom Robinson's case becomes the center point of the story. Scout learns of the injustices in Maycomb's society which reflects on the society during both the 1920s and the 1960s, when this was written. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee masterfully uses the symbolic significance of the Snow, Fire, and the Mockingbird to foreshadow events surrounding …show more content…

It starts with Atticus asking, “Tom, What happened to you on the evening of November twenty-first of last year?.” (Lee 192). This frames Tom as the Victim and shows Tom's side of the story, which overshadows Mayella as it is being told. Tom says that it was not Him who had taken advantage of Mayella, but rather Mayella who had taken advantage of him. Vastly different from Mayella's story, it once again is symbolized and foreshadowed by the snow. The snow is innocence covering up dirtiness, Mayella's lies are dirty and Tom's truth, the innocence of his actions in helping Mayella, and the innocence of his storytelling being completely truthful overshadow Mayella's story just like snow overshadows the dirt. Continuing this line of symbolism, Harper Lee uses Fire to foreshadow the verdict of the Tom Robinson case and the erasure of innocence. The fire that starts in Miss Maudie's house, a neighbor in the town of Maycomb and an old acquaintance of the Finch family, causes mass destruction seemingly punishing Miss Maudie for nothingness, it described as a violent fire with Lee narrates, “...Fire spewing from Miss Maudie’s dining room windows” (Lee

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