Harper Lee's, To Kill a Mockingbird tells both the story of a family and of the entire town in which they live, when both are placed into a scandalous moral and ethical dilemma; a conflict that tests the limits of their bravery and the power of their courage. One of the novel's primary concerns is courage, and its narrator, Scout Finch (a girl not yet six at the novel's start), sees the true nature of …showed first 75 words of 563 total…

…showed last 75 words of 563 total…a gun" {p.128}. It uses Atticus Finch as the coat hanger for an ideal of courage, which breathes with the grace, dignity and compassion of the Old South. It takes Atticus himself to say best what courage really is, and what the courage of the court room shares with that of the battlefield: "its when you know your licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." {p. 128}