85 pages • 2 hours read
Kathryn ErskineMockingbird
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Mission Chest
Content Warning: The final entry contains a graphic description of gunshot injuries.
A mission chest is an elaborately crafted piece of furniture that requires expert care and diligent commitment. It also implies community: Because of its massive size and its numerous drawers and shelves, it is designed to service a family. It encourages coming together—a repository for the accumulated stuff that defines any family.
As a symbol, Devon’s mission chest does just that—it becomes the instrument for bringing together Caitlin, her father, and ultimately the entire community. At the beginning of the novel, Devon’s father has covered his son’s unfinished Eagle Scout project under a bed sheet in the living room of Caitlin’s home. He claims he covers it to protect Caitlin, but Caitlin understands the bed sheet shields her father from accepting what happened and helps justify his retreat into isolation.
Caitlin’s insight—that the unfinished piece of furniture might lead to the closure that she intuits she and her father need—reveals the symbolic value of the chest. In convincing her father to help her complete Devon’s project, the three of them fuse into a single entity: Father, son, and daughter come together to finish the work. Caitlin recounts how carefully the two of them work on the chest to create something “good and strong and beautiful” from the materials Caitlin and her father secure from Lowe’s (163). The mission chest symbolizes the family that the two create in the process of finishing the chest itself.
An Eagle Scout
In a novel that will affirm the importance of community and friendship, it is significant that Devon is an aspiring Eagle Scout. The Eagle Scout award, which only 5% of Boy Scouts earn, stresses a scout’s commitment to community—a willingness to act in ways that reach out to others. The Eagle Scout program demands long-term commitment (sometimes years) and endorses a vision that the self is second to others. The program reflects Devon’s generous heart, which Caitlin’s memories of him likewise reveal. Devon was his sister’s protector and embraced the rewards of being part of her life. He was more than her brother; he was her friend.
That Devon never technically completed the Eagle Scout program—his project was left unfinished—symbolizes how the virtues of the program will bring together the devastated father and his similarly devastated daughter. As a result of completing their Eagle Scout project, Caitlin and her father tap into the reward of discipline and commitment and the powerful energy of others. They become symbolic Eagle Scouts—caring about others, committing to the rewards of service, and embracing their place within a community wider than their own problems and limits.
Colors
The novel uses Caitlin’s hesitant acceptance of the beauty and range of color to symbolize her evolution into a person who can embrace rather than retreat from difficult realities.
When Caitlin talks about her love of the film To Kill a Mockingbird, she admits that she likes the movie because it is in black and white: “Black and white is easier to understand. All that color is too confusing” (79). As a promising artist who seeks to engage and understand the world through sketching, Caitlin initially prefers her charcoal pencil and her careful line drawings. The world she creates with her charcoal pencil is quieter than the ruckus of the world around her: It stays under her command, contained and controlled within her black-and-white perception.
When the art teacher from the middle school introduces himself to Caitlin and suggests she move into crayons and colors, Caitlin declines. His pictures, executed with shades of color that give nuance to the portraits he does for the fundraiser, reveal emotions that black-and-white sketches can’t capture. Caitlin initially dismisses color as “the blurry stuff” and tells the teacher black and white makes things “easier to see” (140). In learning empathy, Caitlin learns that the world is indeed blurry: that people are complicated, that right and wrong do not always work, and that events can happen without explanation or logic. Thus, when the same art teacher gifts Caitlin with a new sketch pad and a box of crayons, her acceptance symbolizes her acceptance of the blurry world of contradictions and complexities.
The novel does not suggest that in seeing the world as more complicated than she previously thought Caitlin surrenders to despair or dread. Rather, the closing scene shows that Caitlin feels joy in recognizing that the world is bigger than she thought and that people are not characters in black-and-white films or cartoon figures in Disney movies.
School Shooting/Cancer
The novel is about loss—about adjusting to death and handling grief in ways that do not undercut the need to go on and live as fully and as happily as you can despite the reality of death. That is a difficult lesson for any child (or adult, for that matter) to learn. Given her Asperger’s, Caitlin struggles to maintain a sense of order in her life and finds the introduction of new, often unexpected conditions a source of anxiety. Early on, when she returns to school after the shootings, she admits how uncomfortable she is with what she cannot contain, control, and define. Given that predisposition for order and control, death becomes the ultimate challenge for her.
The two events most responsible for shaping Caitlin’s young character—her mother’s death from cancer and her brother’s murder in a school shooting—share many of the same qualities: they are both essentially difficult to square with the expectation that the world should make sense. They both involve the abrupt intrusion of the hammer-stroke reality of death. They both impact a wider circle than the those most immediately impacted by their reality. Family and friends feel the impact. Both cancer and a school shooting create a lasting emotional impact. Recovery from either event is a challenge.
The novel uses cancer and a school shooting to symbolize a world that does not make sense and can easily terrify a person. Exposure to what appears to be the random intrusion of death is a harsh element of the transition to adulthood. Caitlin initially understands death in limited and concrete terms: Her mother was there and then her mother was not; her brother was there and now he is not. In opening up first to Mrs. Brook and then to Michael, Caitlin sees that death is not so easy: Knowing that her mother and her brother are gone and understanding they are dead are two entirely different concepts.
The manner of Devon’s death—a gunshot that literally cracks opens his chest—also holds symbolic significance in a work so focused on empathy. His open and generous heart is what the bullet mutilates: “His Heart was hanging out and they couldn’t close his chest up” (31). The imagery underscores the vulnerability that opening oneself to others entails, even though the novel will ultimately suggest that it is worth the risks.
