African American Studies Commons^™

Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Empathy — how it is discussed and deployed by both the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird and by the author, Lee — is a useful lens to view the depictions of racial injustice in the novel because empathy is the moral fulcrum on which the narrative turns. In this essay, I argue that To Kill a Mockingbird fails to aptly demonstrate the practice of cross-racial empathy. As a consequence, readers cannot empathize with the (largely silent) black characters of the novel. In order to examine the concept of empathy, I have developed a critical framework derived from rhetorician Kenneth …