One Smart First Grader

Scout Finch may very well be the smartest first grader ever, and is most definitely (at least I feel comfortable asserting) the most intelligent, well written first grader to emerge from a rural town in southern Alabama. Throughout her narration of To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout continually presents her narrative at a level even the most accomplished writer strives for, even when her dialogue at times demonstrates her inability to construct a sentence with proper grammar. With this in mind, Harper Lee answers a question I have long struggled with in my own writing: How do you present a story via a first person narrator whose education in considerably limited, and reconcile this limitation with your need to present a narrative beyond the intellectual ability of your narrator? Lee seems to answer with a resounding, “Ignore the limitation.”

We’ve often talked about “trusting” or “not trusting” narrators throughout the semester, and with Scout in mind, I think Harper Lee proves that we most certainly can be too academic in our reading of novels. A real Scout simply cannot exist. No first grader, whether from rural southern Alabama or the most prestigious academy in France, can portray a narrative as intricate and compelling as Scout. Yet, we believe Scout despite her being perhaps the most unrealistic narrator of any text in this course.

So what lesson does Scout teach us? Should we criticize Lee for presenting us with such a farce of a narrator? I think not. Rather, it seems to me that as academics, sometimes we look to far into things. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how “reliable” a narrator is. Sometimes we care too much about what broader commentary an author might be trying to make. Sometimes we need to just sit back and enjoy the story.

(To be fair, at the end of this week’s reading Lee hints that this may be Scout’s memoir (101), and thus my argument here may be the farce, not Scout. This is my first time reading the book)