While walking home from their school on a pitch black Halloween night, Jem and Scout Finch are brutally attacked by a drunken vagabond, Bob Ewell. This paper addresses the scene occurring on page 261 of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In this passage, Harper Lee intends the mood to be tense, by using descriptive and vivid imagery for the senses of sound and touch, and also by completely omitting the sense of sight.
Harper Lee begins to set the stage for the rest of the passage, by first using imagery for the sense of sound. Scout first begins to believe something is wrong when she hears “[Bob Ewell’s] trousers swish[ing] softly and steadily” (261) while he tries to sneak up on them. Soon, the fight begins and Scout hears “metal ripp[ing] on metal” (262) when the knife Bob Ewell uses to try to stab her snarls on the chicken wire of her costume. As the fight continues, Bob Ewell attacks Jem, and Scout hears “scuffling, kicking sounds, sounds of shoes and flesh scraping dirt and roots” (262). As Ewell breaks Jem’s arm, Scout hears “a dull crunching sound and Jem scream[ing]” (262). Scout decides to try to help Jem, even though she’s in a chicken wire ham costume, and she runs into Bob Ewell’s stomach to knock the breath out of him. Bob picks her up and tries to crush her, but he is torn off of Scout by Boo Radley, who Scout thinks is Jem. The vivid imagery throughout this fight scene is profound and causes an incredibly tense mood to permeate the entire passage.
However, without the imagery Harper Lee uses to impart a sense of touch, the imagery for sound would be pointless. Throughout the fight, Scout wears a chicken wire costume of a Ham, and has trouble escaping from Bob Ewell. Early in the passage, Scout “[finds] [herself] reeling” (261) and “[cannot] keep [her] balance” (261). As she falls to the ground, “someone roll[s] against [her] and she [feels] Jem” (261) when she bumps into Jem in the dark. Jem pulls Scout up off the ground and tries to help...