Inhumanity

Much of To Kill a Mockingbird is concerned with what the poet Robert Burns called "man's inhumanity to man" and what Mr. Dolphus Raymond calls "the simple hell people give other people." We witness Bob Ewell's inhumanity towards his daughter; the inhumanity shown by the Radleys towards their son; the inhumanity shown by white people towards Blacks. On another level we see how artificial barriers between people are created by vague conceptions like "breeding" and "background" and "our kind of folks". The children find all this difficult to understand. Jem has a theory that "there's four kinds of folks in, the world" (Chapter 23), but Scout thinks there is just one kind of folks. But if there is, asks Jem, why can't, they get along with each other? "If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise I each other?" Understanding adults and their world is difficult. Scout is often confused and rebellious; Dill is at first disillusioned and then cynical; Jem finds it a sad business and at one point he thinks he understands why Boo Radley never comes out of the house "it's because he wants to stay inside".