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Boo Radley Research Paper

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Emily Gantt Dr. Seymour Eng. 113E October 31, 2016 Boo Radley: A Monster? Arthur Boo Radley had always been a surreptitious man, per the people of Maycomb. Not only were rumors about him spread by the town, but words started to float around among the children, too. Jem Finch described Boo Radley as a man “about six-and-a-half feet tall, with yellow and rotten teeth, and popped eyes.” (Lee, 1960, p. 16). The children saw Boo as a monster because they did not take the time to get to know him. Boo chose to stay inside of his home and away from the Maycomb community remaining a mystery to everyone. Due to their childlike innocence, Jem, Jean Louise, and Dill would conjure up fantasies about Boo Radley. All they knew about him was that he lived inside a gated home and he kept to himself. It became easy them to come up with stories such as, “He dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained-if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off.” (Lee, …show more content…

They describe physical attributes and even describe what they think to be mental attributes, too. This applies to Jem, Scout, and Dill, as they saw him as a reclusive monster, but only until he slowly started to come out of his shell in front of their eyes. Jem was caught on the wrong side of Boo Radley’s fence, and as he was running away, his pants happened to get stuck there. Out of fear, Jem kept running. Finally returning to see what the result of losing his pants was, he found that they had been sewn and patched back up, done by the hands of no one other that Boo Radley. When leaving the Halloween pageant, Scout, still dressed as a ham, and Jem were not expecting to be attacked by a drunk Bob Ewell, who was still upset about the verdict of Tom Robinson’s case (in which Robinson was found guilty). Radley, seeming to appear out of nowhere, showed up

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