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Writing Through To Kill a Mockingbird

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Welcome to Writing Through To Kill a Mockingbird. Now in this course we’re going to walk through Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird. We’re going to look at the ways she accomplishes what she accomplishes, sort of the nuts and bolts and see how we can benefit from those same techniques and methods in our own writing.

Now I have to say it’s a little bit of a challenge sometimes teaching writing from Harper Lee just because Harper Lee doesn’t always follow the rules, the kind of rules that writing teachers like me are always trying to inculcate, right? And this is not uncommon for the great writers to sort of flout the rules. And so sometimes she gets a little too telly, I say too telly. She gets more telly instead of, you know, she does more telling than showing sometimes in ways that violate, so to speak, the rules that I’m always trying to get my students to follow. But on the other hand, she also gets away with it, right? And that’s what Flannery O’Connor said, “Do whatever you can do, do whatever you can get away with when it comes to writing.” And so Harper Lee, without question, is one of the favorite American authors. I mean, To Kill a Mockingbird is a much, much beloved book. And so I hope you’ll enjoy going through this book with me. You know, one of the things that people love about To Kill a Mockingbird is that unique, that distinctive voice of Scout, the narrator. One of the things that we love about To Kill a Mockingbird is this first person narration. So that’s where I want to start this course is by talking about the first person narrator. Now you may have already taken the Writing Through the Wardrobe and/or the Writing with Hobbits course in this series, this Writing with Literature series.

And if you remember, those books both have a third person omniscient narrator. And so if you’ve read those books and if you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, you know already there’s a big difference in a story told by a first-person narrator and a story told by a third-person omniscient narrator. Now I’m going to do a quick review of the three main kinds of narration. If you want a more complete look at the different kinds of narration, you can go back to writing through the wardrobe. So I’m not going to go into the kind of detail I did in that course, but I do want to give a quick review. The third person omniscient narrator is a disembodied voice who stands outside the story and sees everything, knows everything, including what’s going on inside all the characters’ heads. You see it in The Hobbit, in The Lord of the Rings. And so in those kind of stories, the narrator will tell you something’s going on over here and then something’s going on over here with a different set of characters. That narrator will sometimes tell you things about characters that characters don’t know about themselves. All right? So it’s, you know, omniscient narrator is like this narrator’s God. This narrator knows everybody, knows everything, understands everything, can comment on things from outside the story, can skip around, can eavesdrop on different characters. Okay, that’s the omniscient narrator. The third person limited narrator, again, is a disembodied voice outside the story. The limited narrator typically shows us only what one character can see, only can eavesdrop on that one character’s thoughts, but not on anybody else’s thoughts. So if you’ve got a third person limited narrator, you might hear all about what your point of view character is thinking, but the only way you can know what any other character is thinking is by observing what that character has done, and then maybe the narrator can speculate on what that person is thinking but doesn’t really eavesdrop. Again, sort of like in real life, the only way you know what’s going on in somebody else’s head is by observing them, hearing what they say, and then judging what you see. All right, so that’s how third-person limited narration works. I say typically shows us only what one character sees just because there are different kinds of limited narrator. Sometimes a limited narrator can see what two or three people can see and think but not everybody. But for the most part, when we speak of a third-person limited narrator, that narrator is limited to one character’s point of view. Flannery O’Connor always wrote in third-person limited narration. My books, the “Wilder King” trilogy, are all written in third-person limited narration. In those books you can only see what the protagonist Aidan can see except for one chapter which if you take my writing with Fitches, my writing with the Boggall course, I will talk at some length about that.

Okay, so that’s our third person narration. There is such thing as second person narration. I’m not even going to talk about it. It usually comes across as a tad gimmicky. It would be hard to sustain that through a whole novel. Sometimes people do, but I’m not going to get into it. For the rest of this lesson, we’re going to be talking about first-person narration. And first-person narration just means that the narrator is a character in the story. So there’s somebody who is there in the story who is going to tell you what happened, what they saw. The reader sees and knows only what this narrator sees and knows, and then everything is filtered through that narrator’s view of the world. If you think about a third person omniscient narrator or even a third person limited narrator, that narrator’s view of the world, it just kind of feels, it doesn’t feel like a, like you’re really, it doesn’t feel like it’s really filtered. It feels like this is just, you’re being told the truth. You don’t read the language in the wardrobe and think, “Huh, can I really trust what this narrator’s telling me?” Whereas with a first person narrator, you often do wonder, “Can I trust what this person is telling me? Can I trust this person’s interpretation of the events that this person is narrating?” Remember, I mentioned third person limited narration, where you only see what one person, one point of view character can see. You can only see that one person’s thoughts. The limitation is a way of getting us closer to the character’s experience. So when we speak of limitation, which sounds negative, that limitation is a big part of what makes that experience richer. To read a either close third person, limited third person, or a first person narration is to feel in those limitations as if you’re getting a more direct experience. And that’s why people love first person narration. There’s a lot to love about the omniscient narrator. It’s nice to have all that information at your disposal, but when you have a first person narrator, all that sort of free range is gone and you’re limited, but that limitation makes you feel more like you’re sharing the experience with that character. Because that’s what it’s like to live in the world, right? To only have one point of view. You don’t get everybody’s point of view. You only get your own. And so there’s something about first person narration that in that limitation it really feels a little more like real life. And so when you choose to tell a story in first person narration, by accepting those limits you’re actually getting a lot in return. So when I speak, and I probably will speak about limitation several times in this lesson, but don’t think of limitation as a negative thing. Think of it as a positive thing. Now once you have decided to write first person narration, the next question is which of the character. Any character in a story can be the narrator of that story. So if you think about this, to kill a mockingbird, it’s not obvious that Scout should have been the narrator. That was a choice that Harper Lee made. She could have just as easily told it from Atticus’s point of view, couldn’t she? She could have told it from Jim’s point of view. It would be interesting to see this from Calpurnia’s point of view. That would be interesting. But she chose to tell it from Scout’s point of view. By the way, an interesting experiment with point of view is the Gilead books by Marilynne Robinson. In those books, she tells the same story more or less four different ways from four different points of view. Gilead, The first is told from the first person narration by the pastor named John Ames. And then there’s a book called Home that really covers the exact same ground, but it tells what those same events look like through the point of view of a woman named Glory, who was a very minor character in Gilead.

But when she becomes the point of view character in, it’s actually third person close, third person limited from Glory’s point of view, it’s like it’s a different story. And you understand, you recognize all the same events, but everything’s different because you’re seeing it from her point of view. So point of view really is, it is a, the same story from a different point of view is not the same story. And so when you choose which character’s gonna be your narrator, You’re choosing which limitations you’re going to accept. You’re choosing which scenes can I depict first hand and which scenes do I have to find some other way to depict them. So think about, I know I’m skipping to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, so if you haven’t read to the end, I’m sorry. But close to the end, there’s an episode in which Scout and Jim get attacked in the dark. And it’s not just dark, but also Scout is wearing a ham costume. And so she can’t see anything. And so in the confrontation or in the fight, she doesn’t know what’s going on. Jim, of course, knows a little more what’s going on because he’s not in a ham costume. And so that story would have been a very different story if Jim had narrated it. When Scout narrates it, she just has to kind of tell what she could see, which wasn’t much. She could hear, but she can’t see. And so that’s an example of when you decide I want to tell this from Scout’s point of view instead of from Jim’s point of view, well that tells you how you’re going to tell that scene. Or there are lots of scenes, for instance, in this story where Scout is watching Jim be the main character. Jim is the one acting and Scout is the one watching and interpreting and understanding in her limited way what Jim is up to. Think how that story is different if it’s told from Jim’s point of view. So point of view, when you decide which character is going to be your narrator, that’s a big decision. It makes a big difference in the way you tell your story. You might say that a first-person narration gives your story an extra layer. So you’ve got the action and then you have the narrator’s understanding of the action or commentary on the action or opinions about the action or for that matter, ways in which the narrator might get it wrong because they can’t see everything, they can’t know everything. And those limitations are actually an extra layer to the story. So when you choose your narrator, you’re choosing what that extra layer looks like. So if, again, I keep using the example of Jim, if we had told this story from Jim’s point of view, all the facts would have been the same, all the events would have been the same, but that extra layer, and by the way, it’s the extra layer that people love so much about this story, right? I mean, people love the action and the way Atticus plays, the way the whole court thing plays out and all that. People love that stuff, but they really love the stuff that this narrator, Scout, and her unique voice bring to that story. What’s so interesting to me and why I love first-person point of view so much is that it engages the reader’s judgment. So remember I mentioned before, when you’ve got a third person omniscient narrator, that narrator starts telling you a story, and you just go along with it. By default, you go along. Sometimes there’ll be some strange little thing where you think, huh, that’s weird. I don’t quite trust this narrator. But your default position is third person narrator, This person is just going to sort of tell me how it is. But when you’ve got a first person narrator, you don’t tend to take the narrator at face value. In real life, whenever anybody tells you a story, you’re always sort of judging their veracity. You’re judging their honesty. You’re judging, do they really know what they’re talking about? So I may have given this– I think I do give this example in another one of these writing with courses. But when a parent has a kid come to tattle tale on the other kid, when that first person– that first kid comes and gives a first person narration, that parent is trying to assess, is this person– is this small person telling me the truth?

What is this– Why is this person telling me this? Then the other kid comes up and tells their version, their first person version of the story. And you’ve got this parent trying to judge between these two narrators, these two first person narrators. So the idea of first person narration, that’s not just a literary idea. That’s something that we’re doing in real life every day. You’re always asking, why is this person telling me this? What kind of person is this? I mean, sometimes– I’m not talking about when a person you know is telling– but when you meet a stranger, and that stranger starts telling you a story, you’re always assessing, how trustworthy is this person? Why is this person telling me this? Your judgment is very much engaged whenever somebody tells you a story in real life. And the same thing is happening whenever you read a first-person account in fiction. you’re judging that narrator. You know, even in the first few pages, when Scout is given all this sort of meandering account of her family’s history and the history of her town and what her town is like, the whole time we’re thinking, now who is this person? And in a way that you don’t ask, who is this person when it’s a third-person narrator? One other thing I want to comment with regard to third-person narration and first person narration is with a third person omniscient narrator or even a third person close or limited narrator, you can be tempted to sort of conflate the author with the narrator and hopefully in your literature class your teacher’s talking to you about the narrator, even a third person narrator is not the same as the author. You have to think about the distinction. Well nobody, with a first person narrator, nobody mistakes Scout for Harper Lee. We know that there’s Harper Lee the author and then there’s Scout, this little girl who’s telling the story. Well, I say a little girl. Actually, this narrator is grown up Scout telling a story about something that happened when she was little. And so you’ve got this nice little gap. only a gap between the narrator Scout and Harper Lee, but also a gap between Little Scout and the Scout. So Little Scout who’s experiencing the story and Grown-Up Scout who’s telling, who’s remembering what it was like to be Little Scout. Now that kind of does get conflated because sometimes Little Scout just sort of takes over and you kind of forget that this is actually being told by a version of Scout who’s a little older. By the way, if you’ve ever read True Grit, if you haven’t read True Grit, I hope you will watch True Grit–I’m sorry, read True Grit. Also, the movies of True Grit are great. But I think the difference between the movie and the book, one interesting thing there is the main character, Maddie Ross, she’s only 14 but she talks like an old lady, She talks in this very stilted, formal way. And in the movie, it’s really funny to see this 14-year-old girl who talks in such a stilted way, especially in the newer of the two movies. But in the book, what we have is a narrator. The narrator is old Maddie Ross. She’s in her 70s. She is an old woman. And so when she is reporting what she said as a 14-year-old, the 14-year-old talks like an old woman. And there’s a really interesting dynamic there that is missing from the movie, because the movie doesn’t have a narrator. In the movie, you just see Maddie Ross walking around saying these very old lady things. And so anyway, I thought I’d mention that. Just again, I’m always interested in the ways writers put gaps in the story. gaps between themselves and the narrator, gaps between the narrator’s younger self and older self. We’ve talked about in other classes and other courses in this series, we’ve talked about the way that irony of all kinds is about a gap, either a gap between what the words mean and what they say, or a gap between what the audience knows and what the character knows.

All these gaps are really important in storytelling and in sort of giving extra texture to your stories. Let’s look at a couple of– a few passages from the book that illustrate some important things about first-person narration. All right, if you remember, on the very first page of To Kill a Mockingbird, we have Scout and Jim debating exactly where this story should begin.

And Jim takes a little bit longer view than Scout. And then Scout says, I said, if you wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama. And where would we be if he hadn’t? I just posted this up here just to talk about a couple of things. One is, one of the things that makes this narrator unique and distinct is her willingness to sort of meander all over the place. And this little example here where she goes all the way back to Andrew Jackson and she’s just being kind of funny and facetious, but this is kind of her MO, isn’t it? She has a tendency, especially early in the book, to sort of go in a lot of different directions. And in so doing, she feels just like a regular, the kind of southern storyteller you’d run into at a potluck supper or something like that, right. And so I think it’s interesting how unrighterly this, this, how undisciplined this is, right? This just feels like the way people tell stories. We as storytellers, when we’re sort of sitting around telling stories with our friends, can be pretty undisciplined, right? Whereas I’m always trying to get my writers, my writing students to be a little more disciplined. Well, here’s an undisciplined moment, one of many undisciplined moments for our narrator and this is the kind of stuff we love about her, right? That she feels like a real person. She feels like a, you know, this doesn’t feel written. It feels like somebody just talking to us. And you have a little more opportunity to do that kind of stuff with a first person narrator than you do with a third person narrator.

I’m not saying you can’t do this in a third person narration, but it feels a little more natural, a little easier in a first person narration. And this again is kind of what I mean when I say you get an extra layer of story whenever you tell a first person, a story in first person narration because you get all this kind of extra stuff, this sort of characterization where the narration is itself a kind of characterization.

Oh, I love this part. This is from later in the book and we’re actually going to come back to this in lesson seven I think, so I won’t spend too much time on it. But look at how, remember we’ve got, our narrator is a little girl. Well she is a, she’s a grown up version of a little girl, but as I said the little girl often takes over. Here’s a great example of where the little girl takes over the story. Atticus was feeble. He was nearly 50. Our father didn’t do anything. He worked in an office, not in a drug store. Atticus did not drive a dump truck for the county. He was not the sheriff. He did not farm, work in a garage, or do anything that could possibly arouse the admiration of anyone. Okay, I love that moment. Again, remember I talked about we engage our, that first person narration engages our judgment, makes us assess who’s telling us this story. It keeps us from just sort of taking the story as it comes, the way maybe you would with a third person omniscient narrator. Well, this is a great example of it, right? Because we look at this and we think, well, it’s funny, right? is a little girl’s perspective that being a lawyer isn’t nearly as respectable as driving a dump truck. We can see here that this little girl doesn’t yet understand the social hierarchies of her world. And so there is this really dramatic irony built in here, right? She understands a little bit, we understand more than she does and so as we watch her, is we hear her tell the story, in some ways, we’re in a better position to understand what’s going on than she does. We are engaging our judgment. Again, we’ll talk more about that when we get to lesson 7. OK, remember I talked about the idea of accepting limitations when you are using a first-person narrator. Your narrator can’t see everything that’s happening in their world, right? Your narrator is not omniscient. If you want to be omniscient, go get yourself a third person omniscient narrator. But when you choose to have a first person narrator, you can only see what that person can see. You can only understand what that person understands, which again is interesting when you think about our little narrator who thinks her dad is feeble because he’s almost 50, who thinks he’s unrespectable because he works in an office. That’s what she understands and that’s what we get, which again puts us in a position of judging, which we love to judge as readers and as people. So the limitation of what your character knows is a challenge, yes, but sometimes it’s a real benefit to you as a writer. So I’m going to wrap up this lesson by looking at another passage from chapter one. So think about what’s going on here. Think about what our narrator knows and what she doesn’t know and where she gets her information. Because again, when you choose a first person narrator, you’ve got to decide how your character knows what, how your narrator knows what she knows if she’s telling things that she wasn’t there for. Okay? So maybe she has a conversation with somebody who tells about what happened, you know, in some, you know, some scene she wasn’t in. You know, again, you got, maybe this person reads a newspaper article about some scene that they weren’t in. So if you’ve got to describe a scene that your narrator wasn’t there for, you’ve got to figure out some way for the narrator to know it. Like, how does your narrator know it? And that’s how your reader can know it. But look at this passage from Chapter 1. “People said Boo Radley existed, but Jim and I had never seen him. People said Then he went out at night when the moon was down and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Macomb were his work.” Okay, does our six or seven year old narrator know anything about Boo Radley? No, she doesn’t have any direct knowledge of Boo Radley. This is people said. And so her ignorance on the subject is kind of the point here, isn’t it? So the fact that she is limited in her knowledge of Boo Radley is not a handicap for Harper Lee here. It’s the whole point, right? She doesn’t know anything about Boo Radley. She only knows what people have told her. This is the way first-person narration often works. Your narrator doesn’t really know what they know and so the author often clues you into that, clues the reader into the fact that the narrator doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. And so in this case, we have a little girl, the narrator, whose knowledge of this is only, basically just a rehashing of the prejudices of the people around her.

She becomes, she doesn’t have her own voice here. She can only participate in the sort of community voice. And by the way, that’s such an important idea in this book. You know, the idea that there are prejudices, there’s this sort of communal behavior that is not quite rational, and then you’ve got individuals who get chewed up by that, or or individuals who don’t understand it, or individuals who are fighting against it. And so this is– it’s really interesting the ways in which the limitations of this first-person narrator become the beginnings of a really important idea in this whole story.

And again, it’s Harper Lee leaning into the limitations of the narrator that she’s chosen. Okay, I think that brings us to the end of lesson one, first person narration. Now in lesson two, we’re gonna talk about the idea of writing in scene and out of scene. I think you’re gonna find it interesting.