To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 4

About This Passage

Selected for rhetorical sophistication (the comic comparison of an aunt to Mount Everest is layered with retrospective adult irony — Scout the adult narrator is reaching back into her child self's ignorance with affectionate amusement), syntactic complexity (the conditional construction 'had I ever harbored' inverts standard word order for literary effect), and thematic weight — Scout's certainty that there is nothing left to learn but algebra is the kind of childhood arrogance that the rest of the chapter will quietly demolish.

Narration Prompt

Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?

Discussion Questions

1. Lee structures Chapter 4 around three discoveries: the gum in the knothole, the polished pennies, and the laugh from inside the Radley house. None of these is dramatic in itself, but each is a small piece of evidence that contradicts the children's mythology of Boo as a malevolent phantom. Consider Lee's narrative strategy. Why does she introduce the corrective evidence in such small, almost-missable forms rather than through a single dramatic revelation? What is she training the reader to notice — and how does this preparation set up the much larger pattern of small evidence the trial scenes will eventually present?
2. The Boo Radley game that Jem invents in this chapter is morally complicated. The children are using a real family's specific suffering — the scissors incident, the long imprisonment — as material for play, and they cast themselves in the various roles. Jem chooses to play Boo. Consider Jem's choice carefully. He is the oldest child and the most invested in the Radley mythology, and he is choosing to inhabit, even in play, the role of the person Maycomb has decided is a monster. Is this choice a sign of cruelty (Jem is enjoying playing the bad role), of curiosity (Jem is trying to understand what it would feel like to be Boo), or of something more complicated — perhaps an early attempt at the very imaginative empathy Atticus described in Chapter 3?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide