Executive Summary In Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman , Jean Louise Finch as a young woman discovers that racial tensions in the south are not as black and white as she thought they were when she was a young girl, Scout, in To Kill A Mockingbird. Her father, Atticus Finch, is not the paragon of virtue she thought he was either and is in fact a “segregationist,” a “gentleman bigot,” and affiliates “with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies.” The story pivots on Jean Louise’s discovery of her father’s flaws, her shock at that revelation and the process she goes through to reach a sort of acceptance around the dethroning of her father. Atticus Finch has been my hero since Gregory Peck played him in the 1962 movie. He has always been the literary example I aspired too whenever I encountered my own moral conundrums. This takedown of the character by Harper Lee is a shock for sure. But in the end, Atticus Finch is still my hero. It is kind of a relief to know ...
Piercing the fog of the opaque world for my own edification