Boo

Throughout this novel, Scout and Jem try to understand why it's alright to do some things, and not alright to do others. Personally, I don't understand much about the Deep South, and maybe that's why I'm such a big fan of Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Conner and Dorothy Allison. The Southern Gothic genre seems more mystic, and more powerful than its British counterpart. Or maybe its just easier for me to relate to someone named Scout than someone named Lady Weatherwither.
There seem to be unwritten vague rules concerning justice, and inherent dread hanging in the air with the humidity. Someone is going to get killed, raped or maybe worse. And it'll probably be some delightful character with an endearing accent that tells you all about it. Does the rest of the country have such a romantic idea of the South that these writers are continuously able to play off of it in order to shock us? Are our views that different? Our crime rates probably aren't.
Flannery O'Connor insisted that, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." Perhaps this is why Boo Radley is one of the more interesting characters in the novel. We would expect a hen-pecking nosy neighbor in any work, and we especially expect horrific displays of violence or racism. Boo Radley is not unlike other characters- Mr. Singer in McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter comes to mind. Both are removed from the rest of the characters, and inspire a perverse sense of awe, coupled with a complete loss of understanding. Yet these characters have some sort of redemptive power. The only other character I can think of like this is God.
We rarely see God, but we sure spend a lot of time talking about him. We really just want to talk to him, even though he could be terrible. Maybe he eats cats! Maybe we get little signs, like a treat stuck in a tree, or we find our pants(haven't gotten into that mess yet, but man, I hope he's up there when I do.). I thought the most kind of shocking part of the movie was that the studly Robert Duvall was cast as Boo, who I imagined to be a lot more deformed. We talked briefly in class about him being white like a ghost. That got me thinking about racial issues, and Boo as this unattainable whiteness that saves some people and not others, for no logical reason. Or maybe he's a symbol for a grotesque God, that humans will never really figure out.