To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 10

Narration Prompt

Trace the chapter's three movements — Scout's catalogue of paternal disappointments, the abrupt arrival of Tim Johnson, and the children's stunned reckoning with Heck Tate's deference and Atticus's hidden past — and articulate how Lee orchestrates the rhetorical reversal that converts childish embarrassment into something closer to reverence.

Discussion Questions

1. Lee opens the chapter with Scout's anxious inventory of what Atticus is not — not a farmer, not a carpenter, no contests of physical skill, will not even play tackle football with Jem. By the chapter's end she has watched him drop a rabid dog at the eighth of a block range with a borrowed rifle. What is the ethical purpose of Atticus's lifelong concealment of his marksmanship from his children, and how does Miss Maudie's gloss — that it is a talent God has given him over other living things — convert mere skill into a doctrine of restraint?
2. Heck Tate, who is presumably better trained and certainly younger, refuses to take the shot and presses the rifle on Atticus with the words, 'Mr. Finch, this is a one-shot job.' Read this scene as a study in professional humility versus inherited expertise: what does Tate's deference reveal about the social grammar of competence in Maycomb, and why does Lee place this exchange at the precise moment the children are about to be morally re-educated?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide