To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 31

About This Passage

Lee’s coda is told as a montage seen from the Radley porch — daylight, then summertime, then summertime again, the neighborhood’s ordinary life replayed from the angle of the watcher. The vocabulary words “scampered,” “trudged,” and “enacting” land inside this passage, where Lee’s diction does most of the imaginative work. Copying it slowly trains the ear to hear how cinematic her sentences become at the novel’s close.

Narration Prompt

In a paragraph, retell the chapter’s sequence: Boo at Jem’s bedside, the walk home, the long montage on the Radley porch, and the final scene of Atticus reading aloud. Note whose perspective shifts where, and where in the chapter Scout becomes the narrator of her own memory.

Discussion Questions

1. What in the chapter tells you that Boo’s body has been shaped by years of confinement, and how do those bodily details ask the reader to revise the legend of “Boo Radley” the children grew up with?
2. When Boo whispers “Will you take me home?” and Scout writes that she would never lead him home, what is the moral distinction Scout draws between leading him through her house and leading him home? Why does that distinction matter at this moment?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide