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About This Passage
These are the chapter's closing pages, and Lee performs in them one of her quietest and most consequential acts of formal control. Aunt Alexandra interrupts her own sentence with the colloquial figure 'somebody just walked over my grave,' Scout offers a chicken-wire ham preview in the livingroom, Calpurnia is consulted in the kitchen, and the chapter ends with the line that retroactively reframes everything that has come before. Three things are happening at once: the chapter's accumulated menace (the WPA firing, the burglary attempt, the harassment of Helen) is being absorbed into the body of the most domestically authoritative woman in the household; the comic register of the pageant is being held in the same paragraph as the apprehension; and Lee is escorting the reader, by the deceptively casual diction of 'Thus began our longest journey together,' across the threshold of the novel's third movement.
When Halloween came, I assumed that the whole family would be present to watch me perform, but I was disappointed. Atticus said as tactfully as he could that he just didn’t think he could stand a page...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Recount the chapter's structure: the three small troubles, Mr. Link Deas's intervention, the Atticus–Aunt Alexandra exchange, the missionary-society aftermath, the pageant preparations, Aunt Alexandra's interrupted sentence, and the chapter's closing line, attending to how Lee orders these movements and modulates between registers.
Discussion Questions
- Lee structures the chapter as a triptych of small troubles — Bob Ewell's WPA firing, the attempted burglary at Judge Taylor's, and the harassment of Helen Robinson — without explicit connective tissue, then closes with a chapter spent largely on Halloween and the missionary society. What argument is the chapter's form making about the relationship between concentrated menace and diffuse ordinariness, and how does that argument prepare the formal logic of the chapters to come?
- Atticus tells Aunt Alexandra that Bob Ewell 'thought he'd be a hero' but received only 'okay, we'll convict this Negro but get back to your dump.' Examine what this diagnosis assumes about the relationship between juridical outcome and social honor in Maycomb, and consider whether Atticus's account is a critique of the town's moral economy or an unwitting endorsement of its terms.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
An anxious or uneasy expectation of something unpleasant, often without specific evidence.
Item 2
A demonstration of something in advance of its full presentation, usually to a small audience.
Item 3
To accompany another person, especially for the purpose of safety or formality.
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Critical Thinking
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