To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 23

About This Passage

Lee compresses the chapter's most sustained jurisprudential argument into this one stretch of evening dialogue. Jem, adamant, would scrap juries; Atticus, smiling against his own better judgment, prefers to reform them — assigning capital sentencing to judges rather than jurors. When that doesn't satisfy Jem, Atticus offers his harder thesis: jurors are 'twelve reasonable men in everyday life,' but the racial code 'comes between them and reason' in the courtroom and at the jail-night crowd alike. Jem replies stolidly — beating his fist softly on his knee — and Atticus delivers the chapter's quietest 'vehement' speech: white men who cheat black men, regardless of how fine their family, are trash. Lee's structural achievement is to show two generations wrestling with the same injustice from different angles, neither rebutted, both sharpened.

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the chapter as a series of Atticus's refusals: the refusal to borrow a gun; the refusal to be 'bitter'; the refusal to scrap the jury system; the refusal to call Mr. Bob Ewell anything more diagnostic than 'his kind always does'; the refusal to overrule Aunt Alexandra in front of Scout. For each refusal, name the alternative posture Lee declines on Atticus's behalf, and identify what the chapter gains by holding to the lighter response.

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus's three-part legal architecture — agreement with the rape statute, deep misgivings about death penalty on circumstantial evidence, and the racial binary that flattens jury discretion ('It was either a straight acquittal or nothing') — anticipates by some twenty-five years arguments later associated with Furman v. Georgia (1972) and the academic critique of jury arbitrariness. Argue what Lee's domestic register gains the legal philosophy that a courtroom soliloquy or appellate brief could not, and how Jem's 'we oughta do away with juries' functions as the chapter's necessary rebuttal even though Atticus prefers reform.
2. Atticus tells Jem that the Cunningham juror who nearly acquitted Tom Robinson came from the same Old Sarum crowd that came to the jail at night — that 'it took a thunderbolt plus another Cunningham to make one of them change his mind.' Place this claim against Hannah Arendt's distinction in Eichmann in Jerusalem between thoughtlessness and judgment, and argue what Lee proposes about whether a man can hold a homicidal disposition Tuesday night and a near-acquittal disposition Wednesday morning without either disposition being his 'real' moral position.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide