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A Literary Analysis of “Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee
Scout’s Continuing Loss of Innocence
Jean Louise Finch lived in New York City and returned home to visit her father Atticus every year since she left. She was twenty-six and single. Her older brother Jem who was four years her senior had dropped dead in his tracks one day from a premature heart attack (Lee Watchman 13). Her father Atticus was now seventy-two and filled with Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Maycomb County, Alabama was home.
When Jean Louise was a child, she learned a hard lesson about prejudice, and she was about to discover that her tired little hometown was still as prejudiced as ever, even more so than before. Jean Louise had no idea how deeply poisoned Maycomb had become over the years, and how close it would hit her father’s home. Her father, Atticus, never protected her from the truth as a child, and rarely sugar-coated any information he shared with her now, but she had been away from the small county for several years. She was not innocent by any means when she left home for the city five years prior. She had seen her share of life’s hardness as a child. She loved her father deeply and did not realize how much she worshipped the ground he walked on.
In the city, she expected racial injustice. In her hometown, she tolerated it. In her father’s heart, she…
