To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter's argument or narrative arc, then identify the central tension and evaluate whether the author handles it honestly.

Discussion Questions

1. Scout's epigram — 'Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing' — is a brief but pointed contribution to what phenomenologists would call the problem of the unthematized background. Husserl argued that our conscious attention always operates against a horizon of unnoticed conditions that make perception possible but remain invisible until disturbed. Heidegger, in his analysis of the hammer that breaks, observed that equipment discloses itself only in the moment of its failure. Consider Lee's deployment of this philosophical structure in a first-grader's voice. Is she doing serious philosophical work under the cover of a child's speech, or is she making a simpler observation that happens to have philosophical resonance? And what does the answer reveal about the relationship between literary intelligence and philosophical intelligence?
2. Miss Caroline's garbled application of progressive educational theory — she forbids home reading while claiming allegiance to a theory that would have valued it — is one of the novel's most precise satirical operations. Lee is exposing a specific pattern in the transmission of ideas: a theory loses its original meaning as it moves through institutions of training and certification, and can arrive at its destination inverted into its opposite. Consider this pattern beyond the specific case. Lee is making a claim about how institutions necessarily distort the ideas they claim to embody. Is this claim specific to Miss Caroline's teacher-training program, or is Lee advancing a more general skepticism about the possibility of institutional transmission of moral or intellectual content at all? And if the latter, how does Lee's own position — as a novelist whose book will be taught in the very schools whose teacher-training she is satirizing — complicate her argument?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide