To Kill A Mockingbird
...for fifteen years is implying that this fact has been stretched out as well to make Boo seem more of a legend than a real person. No one knows why Boo disappeared but people such as Stephanie Crawford make farfetched stories about him to explain why he is like that so that we can understand why they did it. Stories of Boo are thought up to satisfy human curiosity and in most cases they are very different from the truth because explanations of others are made more exciting so that there can be more hype about someone like Boo than necessary molding him into a complete impiety-like character by the town. The children have been fed with so many tales that the house appears haunted and Boo is supposedly a ghost to them. When Scout witnesses the fire of Miss Maudie’s house she is covered with a blanket by Boo Radley, and when she is told this Scout “nearly throws up” (72) because to her, it was not a person that put the blanket on her but a monster. Boo does this with the best intentions to keep Scout warm but Scout cannot see that, all she sees is that she could have been hurt or killed by Boo. Boo is misjudged because of being who he is just like how Tom Robinson is sentenced guilty for a crime he did not commit for being black. Tom Robinson is misjudged as well, not because of his separation from society, but because of his race and outside appearance. Tom Robinson is the African American man that is put on trial for a crime he did not commit. All evidence points to Tom’s innocence but in the end he is sentenced guilty by the judge anyway because of his skin color. Tom is guilty because of “…the evil assumption that all Negroes lie…”(204) and cannot be trusted but the truth is that everybody can lie whether your black or white. Because of Robinson’s skin color he is judged to be malignant and untrustworthy to anybody, nobody looks beneath those views to see who Tom really is. Tom Robinson is accused of the crime of raping Mayella Ewell but Atticus proves that “Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led almost exclusively with his left” (204) and we can conclude that Mr. Ewell was the one who did this. He tries to cover this up by blaming Tom Robinson because Tom is black and Mr. Ewell could get away with the crime because everybody would think that Tom did it because of his race. Tom just like Boo, suffers the consequences of having others discriminate against them. The town says terrible things about both of them and they both get turned into the enemy. Boo and Tom both are rendered as malevolent beings but as the story progresses, we see the characters reveal their true selves which are the amiable and benign sides of them. During the trial of Tom Robinson, Link Deas bursts out yelling that he “ain’t had a speck o’ trouble outa him. (Tom)” (195). Link Deas believes Tom and wants the whole court to understand that Tom is nowhere as cruel as Mr. Ewell says he is. Deas supports Tom because he knows him personally and can see past the color of his skin into a real person that has feelings and is not what everybody else thinks he is. Scout also sees through Boo like how Deas sees Tom. Scout realizes that “He (Boo) gave us…We never put back into the tree what we took out of it…”(278) depicting how both Tom and Boo gave us...