To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 2

About This Passage

Selected for rhetorical sophistication (Scout's realization is compressed into an epigram — 'One does not love breathing' — that functions as a moral proposition about unexamined goods), syntactic complexity (the short declarative sentences after the epigram mimic the flatness of a child's disappointment), and thematic weight — the chapter's core insight is that we notice what sustains us only when it is threatened, and Lee delivers that insight in one small sentence before moving on.

Narration Prompt

Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?

Discussion Questions

1. Scout's epigram — 'Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing' — generalizes from reading to a philosophical claim about how human beings perceive the goods that sustain them. Consider this claim. Is Lee's observation true as a description of how ordinary people actually experience their daily goods (family, health, freedom, the capacity to read), and does the novel that follows seem to take this claim as a first principle that will be tested against larger goods as Scout matures?
2. Miss Caroline Fisher is presented with careful particularity — she is 'no more than twenty-one,' from Winston County in North Alabama, dressed in a candy-striped dress, and newly trained in what Jem calls the 'Dewey Decimal System' (a confusion with Dewey's progressive education theory). Lee could have made her a simple caricature, but instead she makes her young, earnest, and visibly struggling. What is Lee asking the reader to do with Miss Caroline — to forgive her, to condemn her, or to do something more complicated? And what in the chapter's language signals which response Lee prefers?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide