To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 16

Narration Prompt

Read chapter 16 as the long approach Lee imposes on the trial. The chapter opens at the Finch breakfast table and closes in the Black balcony of the Maycomb courthouse. What is each interval — the breakfast, the front-yard observation, the courthouse-square scene, the Idlers' Club, Reverend Sykes's hospitality — preparing the reader to bring with her into the trial chapters that follow?

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus's breakfast theory — 'a mob's always made up of people, no matter what' — operates as a working psychology of crowd behavior. Examine the theory in light of two adjacent test cases: the Old Sarum mob's chapter 15 dispersal at the jail, and the verdict chapter 21 will deliver from a jury organized not by alcohol and rumor but by oath, racial allegiance, and procedural commitment. Argue where Atticus's theory is right, where it is partial, and what its partiality discloses about Atticus's deeper picture of his neighbors. Consider whether a more accurate theory of the jury room would have left Atticus equipped to win the trial — or whether the trial was unwinnable on any theory and the partiality of his picture was the precondition for taking the case at all.
2. Lee's portrait of Mr. Underwood, the recluse who guards Atticus through the night with a double-barreled shotgun and is also the man who 'despises Negroes, won't have one near him,' is one of the novel's most carefully unreconciled moral pictures. Examine what Lee accomplishes by holding the protection and the racism in the same character without resolving them, and argue how this purposeful incoherence shapes the reader's working theory of moral character across the trial chapters. Consider how the chapter 25 editorial — 'it is a sin to kill a cripple' — should be read in light of the chapter 16 breakfast remark, and whether the editorial revises or deepens our reading of Underwood's racism.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide