To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 31

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the chapter’s movement — Boo at Jem’s bedside; Boo’s whispered “Will you take me home?”; Scout’s arrangement of the gentleman’s walk past Miss Stephanie Crawford’s upstairs window; Scout’s vigil on the Radley porch with the seasons replayed; Atticus reading The Gray Ghost beside Jem — paying attention to where Lee shifts focalization, where the prose becomes cinematic, and where the camera lifts from Scout’s shoulder to Boo’s.

Discussion Questions

1. Stanley Cavell’s account of acknowledgement (in The Claim of Reason and the late essays on King Lear) holds that the philosophical question is not whether we know other minds but whether we acknowledge them. Read Boo Radley’s reception in Jem’s bedroom — the dreadful raling cough, the hand surprisingly warm, the timid curiosity — against Cavell’s account, and ask whether Lee has produced an acknowledgement-scene the philosophical literature can recognize, or has supplied something the vocabulary still lacks.
2. Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives and Hannah Arendt’s argument that a life must be told back to its protagonist by another converge in the porch montage, where Scout narrates the novel’s episodes from Boo’s vantage and concludes “Boo’s children needed him.” What kind of narratable selfhood does Lee offer Boo by reattributing the children to him, and what are the limits of such restitution when the man whose life is being told back has himself spoken six words?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide