NP: 50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song

[Mark Kohut]

I may have. You make a straightforward good argument. (unlike your good complex 
arguemnts). Smile.

I am certainly a minority reader. 

If she is an adult and 'she is a child" then my critique applies in reverse.

The Southern Gothic race and gender elements seem pretty unoriginal to me. Maybe 
gender
is more original.

So I go. The anxiety of self-influence. 



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, July 7, 2010 7:13:24 PM
Subject: Re: NP: 50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song

You've misread the narrator; she is an adult, and, of course, she is a
child.  This narrative type is a standard narrrative technique and Lee
makes excellent use of the ironies the distance her narrator affords,
that is, the distance between the scout, Scout, and the implied
author, Harper Lee. Yes, Dill is a fine character. The moral of the
tale is not what you suspect. Scout, not her father (as the film with
Peck seems to have convined the world) is the heroine of this feminist
tale. It's astounding that the book has been misread for so long.
Finch, and his son is, at novel's end, ready to follow the old man, is
a racist. Not an in your face white supremicist, but his latent racism
is obvious enough to a perceptive reader. The tale has more to do with
sex and gender than race, infact, the Southern Gothic elements of the
tale, one such is incest, are developed around sex, interacial sex,
and issues of gender. The novel is far from the ham-fisted and heavy
handed screed about racism that its classic cover and its film have
made it out to be.




On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I recently tried to reread To Kill a Mockingbird.  Am I about the only one you
> sorta know
> who couldn't like it?.....
>
> To me, Scout the narrator is seeing as an adult; she is not believeable even 
as
> a precocious
> young 'un to me.........big FAIL......book 'works' in certain scenes, in the
> Capote character and
> as an unfortunately heavy-handed moral tale.....good as that tale is,
> morally...........
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wed, July 7, 2010 10:30:05 AM
> Subject: 50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song
>
> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128340180
>
>
>
>
>