To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 28

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct chapter 28 as a single chronotope of Halloween night in Maycomb — pageant hall and oak tree, communal mythography and private violence, public costume and tactile recognition. Identify the chapter's hinge, its proportional architecture, and the formal devices by which Lee makes the comic and violent halves cohere as one artistic unit.

Discussion Questions

1. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis describes figural realism as the practice by which one event, fully itself, prefigures and is fulfilled by another, both retaining their concrete particularity. Read chapter 28 through this lens: Mrs. Merriweather's pageant about Colonel Maycomb's slender sense of direction, his subordinates whose corrections he refused, his troops entangled in the forest until rescued by settlers — does this comic founding mythography stand in figural relation to the night's actual violence under the oak, where Bob Ewell ambushes the children of Atticus and is in turn killed by an unnamed rescuer? Or is the relation closer to what Bakhtin would call carnivalesque heteroglossia — competing registers held in suspension rather than typology? What does Lee gain by refusing to settle the question?
2. Ernest Renan, in 'What Is a Nation?,' argued that nations are made by the things their members agree to forget as much as by what they remember; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's Invented Traditions extends the analysis to ritualized civic performance. Mrs. Merriweather's 'Maycomb County: Ad Astra Per Aspera,' with its rustic translations and butterbeans entering on cue, reads as exactly such an invented tradition. What does Maycomb's pageant agree to forget — about Tom Robinson, about Bob Ewell, about the WPA firing, about Helen Robinson on the public road — in order to celebrate what it celebrates? And how does the chapter's juxtaposition of pageant and ambush expose the cost of the forgetting Renan named?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide