To Kill a Mocking Bird

I also read To Kill a Mocking Bird as a freshman in high school, and had a completely different level of appreciation for it as an adult. The novel is ultimately, for me, about perception; people tend When I read it back then, I had a much more black-and-white (pun not intended) vision of the world. At that time, I felt it was about good and evil, and the lesson to the innocent child characters that yes, evil does indeed exist in the world, and everyone at some point comes into contact with it in some way. At the time, I felt that it was about making that realization and needing to incorporate evil into a world belief that all humans are inherently good.

As I've grown, I recognize that while I was not necessarily wrong about this at my young age, I wasn't really seeing the picture fully. It wasn't about evil and good being at the opposite ends of the spectrum; it's about both of these qualities being able to exist in a single person. It's about perception and how it is influenced by the perceptions of others, and it explores how a mob mentality of hate can overtake a large group of people, all the while they are perhaps not each inherently evil individually.