Some books need a railing, unfortunately this will be without one. Harper Lee’s novel “Go, set a watchman” appears without epilogue; an editorial note justifies only the use of the racist term “Negro”; the complex editorial history of this novel is only advertising clouded explained on the back of the Dust Jacket. If it were “the first work” of “To Kill” author of the award-winning best seller “The Nightingale”. It was “written in the 1950s,” and “only now discovered”.
The drought prose can accumulate. When the manuscript of the novel was “discovered” – 2011 from a Sotheby’s employee or 2014 from the lawyer Tonja Carter, representing the commercial interests of the venerable Harper Lee -, though is still the subject of investigative research; how it originated, Harper Lee’s biographer Charles J. Shields has outlined haarklein a few years ago: In January 1957, the young Harper Lee was the first fifty pages of a novel entitled “Go Set a Watchman” in a New York agency, the end of February In 1957, he was ready. When Publisher JB Lippincott, he met a little later a titled “Atticus”.
Is Atticus Finch still the same?
accepted for publication. An editor named Theresa of Hohoff who also worked with a young man named Thomas Pynchon, the structure was too anecdotal, but most of all she must have recognized the enormous emotional potential of those passages in which the narrator Jean Louise Finch – the time the action in the fifties mid-twenties – reminiscent of her childhood in her thirties. In fact, finds out who now that subsequently “debut” reads the famous novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” in these flashbacks almost unchanged: No rate has remained the same, but the little Scout, the child that Jean Louise was once the brother Jem (has in the portraying Harper Lee her childhood friend Truman Capote), the best friend Dill: you are still the same on the way from one version to the next. And even the trial of Black Tom Robinson, who is at the center of the “Nightingale” is mentioned – but with a different result. In the “Nightingale” Robinson is wrongly convicted, what his lawyer, Atticus Finch Scouts father, makes a tragic hero. In the “Guardian”, however, Atticus won these twenty years earlier process in order “to live with himself in peace”. Whether this Atticus has remained the same, is the crucial question.
“Go, set a watchman,” is an immensely political, especially discursive novel, a station drama so far as the New York returned Jean Louise gradually dealing with the central figures of their childhood and youth: the uncle, the aunt, the potential groom, the old being black housekeeper Calpurnia and of course with Atticus, the long idolized Father. But the distance between her and the neighbor of that time hardly seems to be bridged. Jean Louise versa, the head full of liberal Yankee ideas, in an American South back, its all-determining white population sees threatened his life so far. By the will of Washington to Black previously allowed to visit the white-only universities. In Alabama the civil rights movement has taken shape in the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, foot. Apartheid proponents of the South fear for their livings.
The (in the novel, unfortunately not being pursued) case of a black man who was drunk car is driven, and a fatal accident has caused, at first seems to call the plan to Atticus the “Nightingale”. He agrees to defend the man – but his motives are not so loud far as firstly naturally assumes after fifty years “Nightingale” -Reception. Rather, Atticus would prevent a rebellious NAACP attorney comes on the scene. “In Maycomb,” said the aunt, go “no longer visit any Negro, since they behave towards us so.” The NAACP has “instilled them so much poison that it comes out again from the ears”.
There are many hard to bear statements like this in the novel, but the tolerable hardest to come by Atticus himself. “? Want droves Negroes in our schools,” he asked his daughter and sounds otherwise as a South African apartheid advocate who knows about the “outnumbered” the white man: “Do you want your government is led by people who have no idea how to govern? ” Or: “You do realize that our Negro population is lagging behind, right?”
But is this classic 2015 still as a school reading?
Ironically, a particularly gruesome scene runs exactly parallel to the honor held “Nightingale”, the book, the same Atticus Finch as a pioneer of the civil rights movement can appear: In the “Guardian” observed Jean Louise aka Scout from the balcony of the courtroom from her father – only takes the time not for the rights of blacks, but participates in the session of “Majlis”, the organized openly racist (and anti-Semitic) lectures. He himself is not a hardliner as a violent argument with his daughter revealed, however, when he was seventy, he is willing to black citizens their rights even to fail in years to preserve the American South as he knows it.
Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has millions of readers found. The first version of the novel it is now all in front of the same question: Is the Atticus the “Guardian” a completely different character than the Atticus the “nightingale”? Then Harper Lee has glorified him in the final version and created the fictional character of an ideal white middle moth, a bourgeois hero out of a storybook, who apparently had little to do with the observed of her reality.
option number two is even more disturbing: Could it be that even the resolute defender Tom Robinson, the hero of the “Nightingale” racist beliefs had? The twenty year old Jean Louise seems to see it: Tom Robinson’s case, she throws her father before, had “nothing to do with the black boys” had “. Easy like just an ordinary document”
And actually, if you look is reminiscent of the “Nightingale”: Would the legendary Rosa Parks sit in the world of this novel of their own volition and on their own on their seat on the bus? Or do you not would occur a paternalistic Atticus Finch aside to allow her the first place? “Go place a guardian” appeared after nearly sixty years of incubation. At the end of the book presents the question of whether the classic that became of him, in 2015 it is only fit as a school reading.
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