To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 27

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the chapter as a study in tonal architecture: the triptych of three small troubles, the staged Mr. Link Deas confrontation at the Ewell gate, the Atticus–Aunt Alexandra exchange about permanent versus dissipating grudges, the missionary society aftermath and the Mrunas-J. Grimes Everett rhetoric, the Misses Tutti and Frutti Barber comic interlude, and the Halloween pageant preparations culminating in Aunt Alexandra's pinprick of apprehension and the closing line.

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus diagnoses Bob Ewell as having sought public honor and received only juridical concession ('we'll convict this Negro but get back to your dump'), while Aunt Alexandra reads the same behavior as a permanent running grudge. Read the disagreement against Charles Black's account of social meaning in Harper Lee's Maycomb and against Améry's analysis of unreconciled resentment, and develop a reading of which moral psychology the chapter endorses and at what cost to Atticus's predictive accuracy.
2. Mr. Link Deas closes his store, walks Helen Robinson past the Ewell house in deliberate publicity, and announces at the empty windows that he knows are full of children that any further harassment will produce jail before sundown under the Ladies' Law. Examine the scene as a piece of Habermasian counter-publicity in a community whose actually-existing public sphere has just failed Tom Robinson, and consider whether Mr. Link's improvisational use of statutory language extends or merely instrumentalizes the protective architecture of Alabama law in 1935.

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