Mockingbird - Analysis

  The title of To Kill A Mockingbird is taken from a conversation between Atticus and Jem, on page 96, line 14 - "I'd rather you shoot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
  Although it is used as the title, technically, mockingbirds have no appearances in the novel. Instead, mockingbirds are both used as symbols and also to refer to one of the main themes of the novel, good and evil.
  In the novel, a mockingbird is a symbol for innocent, pure and good people that is persecuted by evil. The two most prominent mockingbirds in the novel is Tom Robinson and Boo Radley - they have both done no harm, with Tom Robinson being a picker who's kind enough to help Mayella Ewell chop up the chiffarobe for nothing, and Boo Radley a man who left the children presents and eventually save them from Bob Ewell. Yet, their fates are both sad - Tom Robinson was convicted of rape by the biased jury and shot in his attempt to escape, and Boo Radley becoming a social outcast, abused and isolated by his father and brother.
  The theme of good and evil in the novel transcend to hatred, prejudice, ignorance, which is applied to innocent people like Tom Robinson and Boo Radley, the 'mockingbirds'. After Tom Robinson's death, Mr. Braxton Underwood, a hardcore racist himself, written in his editorial that it is a sin to kill cripples, and likened Tom Robinson's death to 'the senseless slaughter of songbirds (mockingbird)'. Also, in a later conversation between Scout and Atticus, Scout said that people hurting Boo Radley is "like shootin' a mockingbird". The reference to the mockingbirds showed the death of the good at the hands of evil, like Tom Robinson and Boo Radley.
  The To Kill in the title suggested an instructional text, which was proven untrue by the novel; instead of about how to kill a mockingbird, the story actually described how mockingbirds are killed. A subtle difference, but a fundamental one.