In Chapter 27 of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout describes three "small things out of the ordinary" that happened in Maycomb, all three pertaining to Bob Ewell. Two out of three incidents show just exactly how much Bob Ewell is bent upon revenge due to his extremely antagonistic nature. The remaining incident paints Ewell as the sort of lazy degenerate who is completely incapable of improving his own situation.
The first incident Scout describes for us is that Bob Ewell was hired for a job through President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) but promptly lost the job "in a matter of days." In her narrative, Scout notes the following reflection she made about Ewell when she heard the news about his getting fired:
[Mr. Bob Ewell] probably made himself unique in the annals of the nineteen-thirties: he was the only man I ever heard of who was fired from the WPA for laziness. (Ch. 27)
Scout's comment about his actions underscores just how much of a lazy degenerate Ewell truly is.
The second incident Scout describes concerns Judge Taylor, who has a well-known habit of staying home from church on Sunday night. While home alone as usual, reading, he began hearing "an irritating scratching noise" coming from the back of the house. Judge Taylor went to the back porch to investigate and found the "screen door swinging open." Scout further narrates, "A shadow on the corner of the house caught his eye, and that was all he saw of his visitor." Though we don't know for certain the prowler was Bob Ewell, we can speculate it was Ewell since we know Ewell felt humiliated in Judge Taylor's court under Atticus's cross-examination; therefore, we can speculate Ewell was there to annoy Judge Taylor as a means of revenge, or he was there to carry out a more dastardly deed but lost his nerve and ran off. The fact that Ewell would attempt to intimidate or harm Judge Taylor shows us Ewell has a revengeful, antagonistic nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment