Circles in To Kill a Mockingbird and My Life

By Jennifer Carroll

Pine Point School

8^th Grade English

January 31, 2011

(TS) Circles are never ending cycles in which something, be it a book, a feeling or even a friend, seems to play a continuous role throughout your life. (SD) In TKAM, circles are everywhere and with everyone, especially when focusing on Boo Radley. (CM) Boo makes his name known in the very beginning, when three children take a sudden and obsessive interest in making the neighborhood spook come out. (CM) After a whirlwind of chapters detailing the wild pursuit of Boo Radley, the excitement dies down, only to be brought up again when Boo rescues two of those same children from certain death at the hands of a madman. (CM) Boo is finally seen after months of desperate planning and extravagant schemes that eventually faded into nothing in the light of other, more important matters. (SD) Alongside this circle in TKAM, you also have another circle, in which everyone mentioned in the chapters before is brought together in one, small building. (CM) The Halloween celebration brings together all characters mentioned before for a night of tricks and treats that ends in disaster. (CM) All of the little side plots, the tiny, irking, thoughts of “I wonder what happened to them,” are all wrapped up in one evening. (CM) From Judge Taylors “encounter” with an almost burglar to Atticus’s confrontation with Bob Ewell, everything that you wondered about comes around to a final clash of good versus evil. (SD) Another circle that is brought about in TKAM would have to be fear. (CM) Fear rules through out this book, from an old woman’s fear of a painful death to a young boy’s terror for his younger sister as they fight off a knife wielding killer. (CM) Fear, if you look at the book closely, is perhaps, the only circle in this book. (CM) Everything that went on, every action that a person took, was influenced through a fear of something, be it that a black man might be better than a white man or a neighborhood spook might not be so terrible after all. (CS) TKAM  has many circles, some bold and prominent and others subtle and mysterious, but all around the book is like a spider web…just when you thought you traced all the lines, you find a whole new section.