To Kill a Mockingbird: A Tale of Voices

 

Valentina Prieto Torres

 

Abstract

This study aims to interpret To Kill a Mockingbird through its complex double narrative voice to  reveal how this choice of narrator influenced the creation of the novel. TKaM tells the story of a woman, Jean Louise Finch, who is reminiscing about a couple of eventful years in her childhood 
in 1930s Alabama, which included the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of the rape of a white woman whom her father, attorney Atticus Finch, is defending. The author chooses to split the narrative voice in two layers: first, her adult self who is narrating these memories, and second, 
her seven-year-old self who lived through these events. These creative decisions determine the aesthetic object in terms of the creation of the setting, which is a cross historical montage between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s in the United States that allows critical commentary about the early Civil Rights era to be framed in a nostalgic ambiance, and the perspective of the protagonistnarrator who is at the same time a child and an adult, which results in a point of view that is both innocent and analytical. Through Gerard Genette’s concepts of narrative person and narrative time, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas of content and aesthetic object, this complex narrative voice is broken down and analysed in detail, while noting the way that it influences the story telling, and revealing the white power consciousness and antiracism ideologies that the author is putting forth in her novel.

 

Keywords

Narrative voice, analepsis, aesthetic object, content, childhood, evaluative stand.

 

References

 

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