Written Task V.2

RATIONALE

For this written task I wrote an opinion article, about how Arthur Radley lived during his lock down inside his house, and about a fictional case I created based on “To kill a Mockingbird”, a novel by Harper Lee, where Arthur Radley supposedly killed his family and himself.

I wrote my opinion article with a serious tone because I am talking about a serious event, murder. So I think it is the best way to approach to the topic.

The purposes of my text are to show Arthur’s living conditions, not according to what the book says, but according to what I think they might be like. Also to show my opinion about Arthur and the fictional event I created, and at the same time reveal facts about how I think his personality is, trying to relate everything with events that happened the book.

My objective for this written task was to be as clear as possible, so my ideas could be easily understood. Also that my point of view could be easily recognized in the text, to be able to persuade my audience that Arthur was innocent and that his father, and after his death his brother, were both terrible tyrants to him.

TEXT

“Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them”. This was found written on one of the Radley house walls.

Everyone in Maycomb County knows that the Radley family was found dead in the Radley house a week ago, and that it has been a controversial topic since then. I am not saying it should not be this way, it certainly is a shocking event that deserves people’s attention, but the problem is that the judgmental inhabitants from this town blame Arthur Radley for this murder, and I think he is innocent. That is why I will show everyone how he lived, how was his relation to Maycomb county, and why I think he is innocent.

            About three days ago, I was able to visit the crime scene, and I found something very interesting. More than ten diaries written by Arthur Radley himself. He started writing them when his father locked him in the house, and he never stopped writing until his death.

            While I was reading, I started to question myself, why would he kill his own family? In his diaries he admitted that he used to be a “misguided” teenager when he started meeting up with the Ewells, he admits it was a bad idea, and that he should have been punished, but that he would rather be punished by the state than by his father because the state would not have sentenced a teenager to a life in prison. So he definitely had reasons to murder his family because he must have been angry, they deprived him from his freedom. It is an aberration, anyone who does that to his son clearly does not love him like a parent should. He was a tyrant who treated him as a criminal in a prison.

            First, let me tell you how he lived. His father was a tyrant that locked him up inside the house, everyone knows that, but no one had ever entered the house until now. What I saw was a normal house; they had a living room, bathrooms, a kitchen, normal things anyone with a stable economic situation in the 1930’s would have. But in their basement, there was another room, where I found the diaries that Arthur had written. In it, there were a few blankets and chains; they looked like they were used to keep someone from leaving the room. It was gloomy inside, the smell was putrid, and the image of someone sleeping tied up in there was creepy. The atmosphere of the room made me realize how cruel they were to him because it was already cruel enough that he was locked inside his house for all this time, but it is even worse that it was under these living conditions.

            Now that I have described how he lived, I will tell you a few things about the diaries. He described that every time his father or Nathan would leave the house they locked him in the basement and chained him to the floor. He would stay there with no possibility of leaving or going outside, they told him they were ashamed of him and that they did not want anyone looking at him because they would be even more embarrassed.  Eventually he learnt how to untie himself, and when they left, he would be able to walk freely inside the house. He never dared to leave, he just did it a few times, and they were special occasions, in his diaries he said he only went out to help three kids from the town, and to leave them some gifts inside a tree, which was sealed when his brother realized what he was doing, he took away his only way of having a life outside of the house. He would take every precaution possible to avoid being seen because if anyone saw him outside his father would know, probably Miss Stephanie Crawford would have told him, because she was such a gossipy person.

            Arthur Radley wrote in his diaries about three kids that had a special interest in him. He would spend hours in the window watching them as they ran in his house’s front yard, or played a game that apparently was inspired in him. He wrote about how the kids were too scared to go anywhere close to the house, and that it took one of the kids, the oldest of the them, a lot of time to run and touch the house, and after that go back to his friends before anything happened to him. “It is what rumors do” explained Arthur in his diary entry. In their game, they would role play about Arthur’s life, specifically the different events that Miss Stephanie Crawford told everyone about; for example that he stabbed his father in the leg or that he escaped during the nights to scare people from their windows. He thought it was quite interesting, he enjoyed watching them, and he would often laugh, he could be happy at least for a while. For example, he wrote about one time that the little girl was inside a tire, and she rolled inside the house’s yard, when she realized where she was, she was so scared that she even left the tire behind and desperately ran to back to his friends. She even made one of the go back for the tire. He laughed so hard, that he thought the girl might have listened to him. I think these things made him feel important, and that he was as curious about these kids as they were curious about him.

Now, let’s talk about his reputation in Maycomb county. Everyone knew who he was, some people spread rumors about them, some of them I have already talked about, like stabbing his father, etc. Miss Stephanie Crawford was the main “spreader” of these rumors, it sounds absurd, but Miss Stephanie really spread all this nonsense, and apparently everyone believed it. Arthur said it was all part of his father’s plan to keep him isolated, he would tell Miss Stephanie some lies and after that she would just do what she did best, tell it to everyone, then no one would want to see him because they would be afraid of him. Again, his father has taken something away from his son, the opportunity to socialize if he ever got out because everyone would be too scared to try and talk to him after hearing what he supposedly did.

And finally, what seemed odd to me. In the crime scene Nathan Radley, Arthur Radley and their mother, were in the same room, Arthur and his mother were stabbed several times, but Nathan was stabbed only once. Also the only one with blood in his hands was Nathan. How could Arthur have stabbed both of them and be completely clean? Why was Nathan only stabbed once? Clearly because he did it. I think I have proven how cruel this family can be, and that people like Nathan and his father can be capable of anything. Even of locking Arthur in a room with terrible conditions, and why not? of killing everyone in the family.