howdy everyone, I initially typed this up in Google Docs, and until now would have bet money on my having already posted it to the blog. As I am currently typing this, you all know that is not how things played out. Enjoy an a very late and very passionate rant about my least favorite character in To Kill a Mockingbird<\/p>\n
It is easy to hate Bob Ewell because he is an easy man to hate. He was written that way; he is a literary condensation of vitriol, hate, and racism. I would call him a caricature, but we live in an unfortunate enough world that there are people like him in real life. However, he is not the worst character in TKaM. That would be too easy. No, in my mind, the worst character in the book is Dolphus Raymond.<\/p>\n
To Kill a Mockingbird is a dated book, whose at-the-time progressive views and themes are centrist at best when viewed under a contemporary lense. Though this is apparent in multiple aspects of the book, I am focusing on Dolphus Raymond, the spineless coward. Mr. Raymond comes from money. His is an old, storied family, which would have reasonable power and influence in Maycomb, were he not a lover to a black woman and father to her children.<\/p>\n
Maycomb is under the illusion that Dolphus is a drunk; he is constantly drinking from a brown paper bag, and acting outwardly inebriated. This is, however, a ruse. He is a sober man, who just happens to love a black woman and be happy with her. There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of living, and he knows this. However, the issue comes in the way he handles the prejudice of Maycomb.<\/p>\n
Dolphus, as previously stated, comes from wealth, which is likely a large part of why he can get away with his life as a quote unquote vagabond and drunkard. He claims he does this to preserve the peace in Maycomb, but all he does is actively choose not to challenge their racist perception that only a chronically drunk man could enjoy the company of people of color enough to seek them out. It is possible that this could be to protect his wife and children from the scorn that they would receive from the town, by allowing them to not gather too much attention to themselves. However, instead they live as the family of a drunk man, still looked down on by the town, still forced to face the harshness of prejudice and racism everyday.<\/p>\n
Dolphus Raymond could make a change. He could look at Maycomb and say \u201cyou are wrong. Your ideas and your racism are wrong.\u201d But, like Atticus Finch, he looks at this deep-rooted evil, and he chooses to play along. He avoids any conflict, which could lead to betterment of the society as a whole, in favor of preserving the status quo.<\/p>\n
Drinking out of a bag, and defending a black man on trial, are only band-aid solutions that fail to reach the root of the problem, which is the white people who see this as a problem. Without directly addressing these people, no real change is made. Anyway Dolphus Raymond is a spineless loser and so is Atticus for never confronting Alexandra and saying \u201cget that racist BS out of my house you monster\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
howdy everyone, I initially typed this up in Google Docs, and until now would have bet money on my having already posted it to the blog. As I am currently typing this, you all know that is not how things played out. Enjoy an a very late and very passionate rant about my least favorite … Continue reading “extremely late post about Dolphus Raymond”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcJhts-tz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1836,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}