To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 14

About This Passage

Lee writes Dill's account as one comic, breathless sentence — chains, raw field peas, the passing farmer poking pods through a ventilator, the camel job, the infallible sense of direction — and the comedy is the chapter's quiet trick. Dill is inventing this story because the truth is too plain and too sad to tell: his parents bought him things and went off to a room by themselves. The fabrication is more bearable than the fact. Notice how the parenthetical interruptions ('there were basements in Meridian') give the lie the texture of plausibility, as though Dill is anticipating his listener's skepticism and answering it. The whole performance is a child's elaborate cover for the small, unbearable truth that follows in the next pages.

Narration Prompt

Trace Chapter 14 in three movements: the household argument over Calpurnia (Aunt Alexandra wants her gone, Atticus refuses, Scout overhears and mistakes the 'her' for herself), the brief fight between Jem and Scout that ends with Atticus separating them, and the discovery of Dill under Scout's bed leading to the late-night conversation that closes with Dill's quiet line about Boo Radley. Conclude by considering what these three movements share — each, in its way, asks who counts as wanted in a household.

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus's defense of Calpurnia — that she is 'a faithful member of this family,' that he could not have got along without her, that she has been harder on the children than a mother — is one of the chapter's clearest moral statements. Examine the precise terms Atticus uses to describe Calpurnia's place in the household, and analyze what these terms reveal about Atticus's idea of family in contrast to Aunt Alexandra's lineage-and-class account in the previous chapter. What does Atticus's defense cost him in his relationship with his sister, and why is he willing to pay that cost?
2. Lee builds a deliberate contrast between Calpurnia, who 'dried Scout up' when Scout asked what 'rape' means, and Atticus, who answers Scout's question in plain words. Each adult has reasons for the choice she or he makes. Examine the contrast carefully: what might have driven Calpurnia's silence, what drives Atticus's plain answer, and what does the chapter as a whole teach about the relationship between truth-telling and the moral education of children?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide