to kill a mockingbird (by Harper Lee)

I The text under analysis is an abstract taken from the novel ‘To kill a mockingbird’ written by
Harper Lee. It belongs to the publicistic functional style, whose aim is to make the speaker’s point
of view understandable to the reader in order to persuade him act in the desired way. The text under
consideration is an oratory. It has such features as the direct address to the audience, the wide use of
contractions and colloquial words.

II Atticus Finch delivered a speech, in which he defended a black man, Tom Robinson, a victim of
racial intolerance. Atticus enumerated the facts, concerning the case. He stressed the fact that the
state hasn’t provided any substantial evidence against the defendant: there wasn’t any solid medical
evidence and the testimony of the witnesses was quite doubtful. The title of the novel is
metaphorical, where the mockingbird embodies the defendant, who is harmless but accused by
people of doing something he hasn’t done only because of the colour of his skin.

III To make the atmosphere of the court more authentic the author makes use of a great amount of
thematic words connected with legal procedure, e.g. ‘trial’, ‘defendant’, ‘cross-examination’,
‘jury’, ‘testimony’, ‘evidence’, ‘witness’. The key word in this text in my opinion is the word
‘equal’, because it perfectly represents the point of view of the author, that all people have the same
rights, regardless of their race.

IV As for the syntactical composition of the sentences, they are rather long and characterized by a
large amount of attributive clauses:
’The witness for the state, with the exception of the sheriff Maycomb County, have presented to
you…
It can be explained by the fact that Atticus Finch was an educated and highly intelligent man.
Although such long composite sentences add the intensity to the speech, they also make it easier for
the jury to follow the idea of the speaker, because the clauses are not extended and don’t contain
participial and gerundial constructions.

V The elaborate system of connectives makes the speech more fluent and cohesive. The usage of
such connectives as ‘and, but, and so, which’ at the beginning of a sentence is frequent in the text,
for example one of the paragraphs begins with the sentence: ‘And so a quiet, respectable, humble
Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman…’ Thus the author
continues the idea of the previous paragraph, but brings extra attention to it. In the sentence
‘Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie…’ the connective ‘which’ adds emphatic stress to the
word ‘lie’ and makes the listeners concentrate their attention on it.

VI The author also resorts to different types of repetitions throughout the text, which make his idea
more convincing, clear and memorable to the reader. The following types of repetitions can be
traced in the abstract:
1. Syntactical repetition.
‘There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an
immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without
desire.’
 ‘A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.’
2. Catch repetition: ‘You know the truth, and the truth is this…’
3. Anaphoric repetition: ‘…some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men
are not to be trusted around women…’
4. Ordinary repetition: ‘I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her.’, ‘Our
courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the
great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.’
VIII The emotional colouring of the text is achieved by means of metaphors (e.g. ‘…a code so
severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with’, ‘She is the victim of
cruel poverty and ignorance’). In the sentence ‘This case is as simple as black and white’ the author
resorts to trite simile to express his attitude to the case. The reader comes across hyperbole in the
following sentence: ‘ an assumption one associates with mind of their caliber’.
IX The speech is abundant in epithets with negative connotation, such as ‘cynical confidence’, ‘evil
assumption’, ‘immoral beings’, which reveal the criticism of the author to the biased judgement of
the white people to the black race.
VII Another stylistic device typical for the oratory, allusion, is also present in the text. ‘Thomas
Jefferson once said that all men are created equal…’ The author refers to the Declaration of
Independence, which states that individual human rights of all people should be valued and
appreciated.
Other linguistic means, which serve the purpose of convincing the reader and making the speech
more expressive are:
 climax (e.g. ‘…she must put him away from her – he must be removed from her presence,
from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense.’), which makes the utterance
sound more intense and stronger, as the author explains the behaviour of the girl,
 antithesis (e.g. ‘Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man.’, ‘…one human
institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man equal of an
Einstein…’, where the author makes use of antonomasia, such as Rockefeller and Einstein,
to intensify the effect of antithesis).

Due to the rich usage of various stylistic means the message of the speech turned out to be
extremely powerful and emotionally appealing. The lawyer did his best to prove Ton Robinson’s
innocence, make the jury see a human being in his defendant. It takes a lot of courage to stand for
a black man in an intolerable society of those days.