An Analysis Of To Kill A Mockingbird From The Perspective Of Deconstruction

Harper Lee is a creative and brilliant American woman writer who is regarded as one of the representative American southern writers. She is best known for her one and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which enjoys great popularity since its publication and wins Pulitzer Prize in American literature. Focusing mainly on the trial of a black man Tom, this novel is narrated through the eyes of a little girl Scout, who harvests experiences from innocence to maturity. On the one hand, the cruel social reality is brutally displayed and some social evils are mildly assailed, such as the social hierarchy, racial prejudice and human nature’s dark side. On the other hand, it is convinced by Harper Lee that still there are goodness and justice in the society and human nature. However, beyond all these narration comes a deeper understanding that the white superiority and patriarchy are degenerating and deconstructed.Relative researches on this novel concentrate on post-colonial study of the identity of blacks, feministic study of the female characters, or psychological study of children’s growth. However, few of them start their researches from the angle of deconstruction. To Kill a Mockingbird cannot be simply read as a book for children or a feminist book, because of its possibility of various textual interpretations, which is exactly what deconstruction believes. This novel is put in a complex social situation where patriarchy and racism prevail with two plots that a black guy is wrongly convicted and a white boy has been locked for more than 15 years. The author of this thesis believes that her unique writing techniques and her languages’ open meanings are quite in conformity with deconstruction. Through her narrations, Harper Lee succeeds in exposing and subverting three binary oppositions existing in To Kill a Mockingbird, namely, man/woman, white/black and adult/child. According to Logo-centrism, which emphasizes the hierarchy, the former term of a pair of binary opposition is of superiority and higher presence, while the latter is of lower status and inferiority. Through the deconstructive analysis, Logo-centrism is deconstructed and three pairs of binary oppositions are subverted. After the deconstruction, non-hierarchical tendency are supported.This thesis consists of an introduction, a main body and a conclusion. The first part is devoted to an introduction to Harper Lee and her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, literature reviews and deconstructive theory. The second part is the main body, which consists of three chapters. Chapter one deals with the deconstruction of patriarchy, which analyzes three main characters in the novel and demonstrates that females are not inferior to males and males are not necessarily superior to females. Chapter two mainly focuses on the deconstruction of White-centrism, in which two families are described in details. Through the description, the traditional images of whites are subverted and proved to be not superior to blacks. Chapter three put emphasis on the deconstruction of adult-centrism, in which the central position of adults are subverted by the so-called marginal children. The last part is a natural conclusion, which gives a summary of the thesis and points out the major findings.