From Conflict to Identity: Main Issues Explored in US Literary Education - Sykalo Eugen 2023

How does Harper Lee explore the themes of empathy and understanding in “To Kill a Mockingbird”?

The Uneven, Unrelenting Empathy of To Kill a Mockingbird

So, To Kill a Mockingbird. A book you probably associate with dog-eared school copies, that one English teacher who called everything "timeless," and maybe a feeling of relief when the final chapter was finally behind you. It’s one of those stories we file away as “important,” like flossing or reading the news—worthy, necessary, but also deeply, deeply over-discussed. And yet, somehow, Harper Lee’s 1960 classic manages to wriggle its way into your head. Not because it’s perfect (it’s absolutely not), but because it refuses to tidy up its emotional mess.

Let’s not kid ourselves: empathy in Mockingbird is complicated. It’s beautiful and frustrating and sometimes infuriatingly half-hearted. Lee doesn’t hand us a guidebook on how to be a good person—she drops us into a world where goodness is fragile, fleeting, and often kind of useless.

Empathy Is a Game of Perception

First, there’s Scout, the child narrator who treats the world like her personal science experiment. Everything about her screams curiosity—her itchy desire to understand people, her impulsive (and often disastrous) attempts to connect the dots. Remember Boo Radley, the town’s resident ghost-story inspiration? Scout spends most of the book convinced he’s a lurking, knife-wielding horror movie villain, only to realize he’s basically a gentle shut-in with terrible PR.

This isn’t groundbreaking stuff—“don’t judge a book by its cover” is practically kindergarten curriculum—but Lee makes it hit harder by keeping Scout so raw, so wrong, right up until she isn’t. Boo isn’t reintroduced as some kind of moral savior; he’s just a person who’s had enough of being misunderstood. There’s a kind of bittersweet alchemy in how Scout learns to see him, like empathy is less about transformation and more about wiping the fog off the glass.

But Scout’s not the only one stumbling through this empathy obstacle course. Enter Atticus Finch, the moral superhero every English teacher adores. Except—and here’s the kicker—he’s not actually all that heroic. Sure, he’s wise and measured and deeply committed to justice, but his vision of empathy feels painfully narrow. He’ll tell Scout to “consider things from another person’s point of view,” but he can’t seem to extend that generosity to the system itself.

Atticus Finch’s Empathy Problem

Here’s where things get sticky. Atticus is, in many ways, the embodiment of what empathy should look like: a man who defends an innocent Black man, Tom Robinson, in a town marinated in racism. Admirable, right? Sure. But dig deeper, and his worldview starts to feel a little… undercooked.

For Atticus, empathy is intensely personal—he’s all about understanding individuals, even the odious ones. He asks his kids to see the humanity in their openly racist neighbors, to practice a kind of emotional generosity that feels almost masochistic. But what about the system that enables those neighbors? What about the institutional rot that makes Tom Robinson’s conviction inevitable, no matter how brilliant Atticus’s defense?

Empathy, as Lee portrays it through Atticus, is aspirational but incomplete. It’s like painting over water damage without fixing the leak: it looks good for a minute, but it’s not solving the problem.

Maycomb: The Town That Empathy Forgot

And then there’s Maycomb, the dusty, gossip-soaked Southern town that feels like a character in its own right. Lee writes it with a kind of scathing affection, as if she can’t quite decide whether she wants to hug it or torch it. Maycomb is the perfect setting for Lee’s empathy experiment because it’s so utterly unequipped for it.

The people of Maycomb don’t do nuance. They see Tom Robinson not as a man but as a symbol of everything they fear and hate. They see Boo Radley as a punchline, a cautionary tale, or an urban legend—anything but human. And yet, there are flashes of grace: moments where empathy glimmers, however faintly, like a firefly that refuses to be caught.

But Lee never lets us romanticize those moments. Tom’s trial is a gut punch, not because the outcome is shocking—it’s not—but because it’s so relentlessly, crushingly predictable. The jury doesn’t care about truth or fairness; they care about maintaining their warped version of order.

The Fragility of Empathy

What lingers after you finish Mockingbird isn’t the triumph of empathy but its fragility. Empathy, in Lee’s world, is a muscle—one that’s underused, misunderstood, and constantly at risk of atrophy. It’s not a cure-all; it’s barely a Band-Aid.

And maybe that’s why the book still resonates. It doesn’t pretend that empathy is easy or that it always works. It doesn’t give us neat resolutions or moral victories. Instead, it asks us to sit with the discomfort, to see the cracks in the façade, and to keep trying anyway.

In a world that feels increasingly allergic to nuance, To Kill a Mockingbird is a reminder of how messy, maddening, and necessary empathy really is. It’s not perfect—far from it—but that imperfection is what makes it feel so achingly, infuriatingly human.