In To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee frequently uses dramatic irony to develop the plot and themes concerning Arthur (Boo) Radley. Dramatic irony is a contrast between a character's limited understanding of a situation and the audience's greater understanding. It is developed when a character has a much lesser understanding of a situation than the audience does.
Examples of dramatic irony being created to develop plot and themes concerning Arthur Radley are seen in the small things he does for the children to show he cares. Due to these expressions of care, the reader knows Arthur is not the dangerous monster the children believe him to be but rather a very kind and caring person. The reader is especially faster to understand Arthur's real nature than Scout is due to her age.
One specific example is the moment she discovers she is wearing a woolen blanket wrapped around herself the night Miss Maudie's house catches fire. Jem is very quick to reach the conclusion that it must have been Arthur who covered Scout up and to understand it was an act of kindness; however, Scout, being young, is very slow to realize who covered her up, and her emotional response is nothing but sheer terror. We see the slowness in her realization when she responds, "Thank who?," to her father's comment that she may someday be able to "thank him for covering her up" (Ch. 8). We further see Scout's current inability to see Arthur as a benevolent person when she responds in terror to Jem's teasing, as we see in the following narration:
My stomach turned to water and I nearly threw up when Jem held out the blanket and crept toward me. "He sneaked out of the house--turn 'round--sneaked up, an' went like this!" (Ch. 8)
Since the passage above shows that Scout clearly has a far lesser understanding of what kind of person Arthur Radley is than the reader has at this point in the story, we can see that author Lee is using this incident and passage to develop dramatic irony.
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