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No Fear Translations of Shakespeare’s plays (along with audio!) and other classic works
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“I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.”
This quote from Chapter 1 places the story firmly in the past, as narrated by an adult Scout. Here she foreshadows events to come in her telling, and explains that the story begins (and will ultimately end) with Boo Radley.
“Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were blood-stained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.”
In Chapter 1, Scout’s brother Jem offers a description of Boo to their friend and neighbor, Dill. Jem’s words liken Boo to something supernatural, piquing the children’s fascination as well as their fear. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Character: Jem, Quotes by Character: Boo Radley, and Quotes by Symbol: Boo Radley.
“The old house was the same, droopy and sick, but as we stared down the street we thought we saw an inside shutter move. Flick. A tiny, almost invisible movement, and the house was still.”
To Kill a Mockingbird belongs to the Southern Gothic genre, as this description of the Radley house from Chapter 1 demonstrates. That the house is described as “droopy and sick” is an example of personification—a literary term for applying human characteristics to something non-human. Personifying the house in this way gives it an eerie, almost supernatural feel compounded by the flicker of movement that hints at future encounters with the home’s mysterious occupants.
