Chapter 1
Summary
- story is narrated by the girl Jean Louise Finch (nickname: Scout)
- she recounts the family history, first ancestor was Simon Finch who was religiously persecuted and who established a farm in Alabama
- her father and her uncle are the only persons in the family who make a living away from the farm
- Scout‘s father Atticus is a lawyer in Maycomb, a poor town suffering from the effects of the Great Depression
- he lives in Maycomb with his children Scout and Jem and the housekeeper Calpurnia who helps raising the kids and who runs the household, Atticus‘ wife died when Scout was two
- summer of 1933: Dill - a boy named Charles Baker Harris - moves next to the house of Jem and Scout and they spend their summer (and the following summers) together, the three of them act out different stories as a pastime
- Dill suggests to lure Boo Radley - the creepy neighbour - out of his house
- Arthur Boo Radley lives in the Radley place and has not been seen outside that house for many years, Scout explains that he once got in trouble with the law and that ever since, he has been kept in the house by his father
- it is rumoured that Boo stabbed his father with a pair of scissors
- Boo still stays inside, even though his father died and his brother Nathan came to live with him
- Dill dares Jem to touch the Radley house - nothing happens, yet Scout believes that there is a movement at a window
Function
- Scout as the narrator of the story is introduced
- story takes place between her 5th and 9th birthday
- first-person narrative, the story is assumed to be narrated much later in Scout‘s life
- mix between child‘s and adult‘s point of view
- language shifts when the older Scout describes events retrospectively
- introduction of the Finch family
- Jem and Scout and their perception of imagination and superstition and their applying it to people in town as the center of the story
- Dill as dominant character throughout the childhood of both Jem and Scout; he is a summer visitor and does rarely get in touch with Maycomb‘s society
- Boo Radley is characterized in a childish manner: he is malevolent phantom eating squirrels