To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 17

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the rhetorical architecture of the chapter — the staging of Mr. Heck Tate's testimony, the embedded ethnography of the Ewell place, Atticus's cross-examination of Mr. Bob Ewell, and the pen-and-envelope reveal — and identify, for each set piece, the move Lee performs that the courtroom itself cannot.

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus's voice fractures into an audible 'edge' precisely once during a long cross-examination of Mr. Heck Tate — when the question is why no doctor was called for Mayella. What does the discipline of that single rupture, against an otherwise amiable register, disclose about Atticus's understanding of where moral force should be spent in a Maycomb courtroom?
2. Lee embeds the long ethnographic description of the Ewell place inside Mr. Bob Ewell's testimony rather than framing it before or after. Examine what this structural choice reveals about Lee's view of the relationship between testimony and habitat, and how it converts narration into a parallel proceeding the witness cannot answer.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide