Innocence and Experience

Innocence and Experience:

            Someone in the book who has a great deal of experience is Atticus. Atticus is the lawyer of the city and one of the best in the business. He used lots of experience during the trial when questioning Mayella on Tom Robinson beating and raping her. “Atticus’s voice had lost its comfortableness; he was speaking in his arid, detached professional voice” (Lee 247). Anyone who has seen Atticus run a trial has seen him in a professional state. As Atticus goes through the trial it seems that he is very calm which shows that he has experience in the courtroom. Another unknown experience of Atticus’s that was shown part way through the book was the experience of sharpshooting; He was even given the nickname “One-Shot Finch” (Lee 128). Jem saw Atticus shoot the mad dog when he wasn’t supposed to. Atticus only took one shot and killed the dog. This was an unknown experience of Atticus’s because his family didn’t even know about his early shooting career. This part of the book is ironic because the main message of the book is to not judge a book by their cover but Atticus is already a mysterious man with different secrets that are hidden within his past. Atticus often looks like a lawyer on the outside but he also looks like a man who has a shady past with lots of hidden secrets.

When Atticus speaks, he has great intelligence and a wise perspective. He says many sentences in the book where the reader would have to think about what he had said and take a while to think over it again. “You never really understand a person until you climb in his shoes and walk around in them” (Lee 374). This was when Jem had just spoken to Atticus about Tom Robinson’s unfair trial and Boo Radley saving the Finch children. Atticus said this quote earlier in the book but I believe that this quote is more significant than the first one because it is about Jem. Jem repeating what his father had said earlier says this quote and finally realized that people can be good whether or not they are put in a different situation. This relates to experience because Atticus passes down his knowledge and intuition to Jem through wisdom of speech. This was Jem’s final understanding of the moral of the book, don’t judge a book by its cover.