At the end of Harper Lee's To Kill a
Mockingbird, we can assume that Scout turns a big corner in becoming more
mature regarding Boo Radley. Throughout the story, I feel she is more curious about the
person of Boo, while the boys are more fascinated with the gross
and scary rumors about Boo. Like kids who show off nasty scraped knees, the boys are
fascinated by descriptions of Boo's "sharpened teeth," and his tendency to eat wild
things like squirrels.
Scout's experience with Boo, while
Jem lies unconscious in his bedroom, shows that she sees herself more as a young lady,
and she acts this way with Boo as she walks him
home.
I
slipped my hand into the crook of his arm.He had to stoop
a little to accommodate me, but if Miss Stephanie Crawford was watching from her
upstairs window, she would see Arthur Radley escorting me down the sidewalk, as any
gentleman would do.
This
passage indicates a change in Scout. She is not afraid of Boo, and now that she has seen
him, she can relax and treat him as a guest—as Aunt Alexandra would have her do. She
will share this impression of this time with Boo, with Jem when he wakes in the morning.
That would have an effect on Jem. However, so much has happened on this night: the
attempted murder of the children by Bob Ewell, Ewell's death, and Boo's triumph is
saving "his" children, that I cannot help but feel they will have changed a great deal.
Their fascination for Boo Radley may not be as strong after coming so close to
death.
We learn, too, in the last chapter, that Scout never
sees Boo again. It does not explain why. And for the sake of the plot, Boo was there,
heroic in his efforts, when they most needed him, but his life will obviously return to
"normal," which Heck Tate suggests would be easier for a man like
Boo.
There is a certain irony at the end where Scout shows
more maturity with regard to Boo and social niceties. She notes
that:
Boo was
our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck
pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree
what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me
sad.
Scout demonstrates a
sense of indebtedness in that she and Jem had taken from Boo and never paid him back. It
is very mature of her to think of being neighborly, especially at her young age, and
with Boo—not their most sophisticated neighbor, though she doesn't see
this.
The irony is that they did give
Boo things in return. He watched and laughed as Scout's rolling tire bounced off the
side of the Radley house; he was aware of them as they crept onto the porch; he was
probably entertained as he watched them play; and, they allowed him—for a short time—to
escape the prison in which his family had placed him, not just to share gifts with them,
but to save them.
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