85 pages • 2 hours read
Kathryn ErskineMockingbird
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “No Running. Walking.”
Content Warning: The Chapter 11 Summary contains references to a school shooting and gunshot wounds.
The next day in school, Mrs. Brook tells Caitlin she is changing Caitlin’s schedule so that Caitlin will take recess with the younger kids. Caitlin is nervous and sucks the sleeve of her sweater, a sign of her agitation. As she and Mrs. Brook head to the playground, Mrs. Brook stresses to Caitlin that to make friends she needs to make eye contact: “We really need to work hard on making friends” (53).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Michael and Manners”
Caitlin prepares for her first 20-minute recess with the younger kids. She sees a kid in a red hat who she remembers attended Devon’s memorial service. He is sitting alone on a bench, hunched over; Caitlin thinks he looks lonely, his eyes as sad as Bambi’s. She goes over and offers him a gummy worm by way of introduction. The boy asks whether Caitlin misses her brother. Caitlin likes that the boy minds his manners: He is polite and keeps out of her personal space. At the end of recess, they exchange names. He is Michael. “I wonder,” Caitlin asks, “if this means I have a friend” (61).
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Day Our Life Fell Apart”
When Caitlin receives an A on her project on the heart, she thinks back on the day her brother was shot. She remembers coming home from the hospital. Her dad yelled and kicked the furniture, asking “why” over and over. The doctors had tried but failed to “close” Devon’s heart. The more Caitlin thinks about that night, the more she needs to hide in the comfortable empty space of Devon’s unfinished cabinet. She imagines that she is Devon’s heart and beats her arms “wilder and wilder” (65), until her head is banging against the chest. Her father, alarmed, comes in, picks her up, and cradles her until she calms down.
The two watch television; the news has a feature on the shooting at Virginia Dare Middle School, reporting that the surviving shooter has now been charged. The footage briefly shows the shooter playing to the cameras, smirking and flashing a peace sign. The newscaster hopes the trial will give the small town “closure” (66). The word is new to Caitlin. She looks it up in her dictionary and finds that it means gaining a conclusion to a difficult experience. With her father upstairs crying, Caitlin wonders how she can get this closure.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Closure”
The next day Caitlin asks Mrs. Brook about closure. Mrs. Brook says that some people find closure in church, others with friends, and some with counselors. Nothing helps Caitlin. Really, Mrs. Brook says, only time really helps. She advises Caitlin to be patient: “There’s a solution out there with your name on it” (72).
At recess Caitlin asks Michael about closure. He tells Caitlin that he and his father have grown apart since the shooting; he always wants Michael to throw a football or play frisbee, but Michael is too sad. Michael says he will ask his father about closure.
Chapter 13 Summary: “To Kill a Mockingbird”
Caitlin goes into Devon’s room. It is still like it was weeks ago. Her charcoal sketches are still taped to the walls. She wishes she could ask Devon about closure; he was smart and always had time to talk and joke. They would do homework together. He also shared Caitlin’s love of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, and the two had watched it over and over. Devon said the girl in the movie, Scout, reminded him of Caitlin in her pluckiness and honesty. His nickname for Caitlin was Scout.
What Caitlin loves most about the movie is that it is in black and white. “Black and white is easier to understand. All that coloring is confusing” (79). She thinks about what the movie taught her: that it is a sin to kill any innocent creature, like a mockingbird, that has no intention of hurting you. Caitlin guesses that the school shooters never saw the movie.
Chapter 14 Summary: “My Skills”
Mrs. Brook continues to encourage Caitlin to develop her “interpersonal skills” (82). Caitlin doubts she has any. She has lots of skills—drawing, memorizing, being helpful, reading, and burping the alphabet, to name a few—but sharing with friends is not one of them. As the two walk around the playground, Mrs. Brook points to kids talking to each other, playing together, laughing, and having a good time. Trying to see the world from another’s perspective is important, she tells Caitlin. That feeling is called empathy: “If they’re happy, they can be happy with you. If someone is very sad you should be quiet and maybe try to cheer them up” (86). Mrs. Brook uses the word “finesse” to describe the social graces Caitlin struggles with, and Caitlin is taken with it.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Finesse”
Michael tells Caitlin that he asked his father about closure; he answered only that the two should toss a football. As Michael and Caitlin talk, Josh comes up to them. Caitlin is shocked when Michael says Josh is one of his friends. Soon a bunch of first graders, friends of Michael, gather around Josh and Caitlin. For the first time Caitlin is happy, surrounded by happy little kids who want to hear her burp the alphabet. She compares herself to Snow White with all those happy dwarfs.
Chapter 9-15 Analysis
If the novel is a coming-of-age story, this is when Caitlin begins her evolution. Caitlin is introduced to two new words that will shape and direct her transition into adulthood. One is “closure”: finding a way to put a traumatic experience in the past in order to survive. The other word is “empathy,” which Mrs. Brook introduces in explaining the importance of others and the need for Caitlin to drop her confrontational attitude and moderate her preference to be alone. Closure and empathy will become elements of the same epiphany.
One question Mrs. Brook poses—“Do you know how to communicate with [the girls in your class]” (86)—is critical in teaching Caitlin the importance of breaking out of her personal space and challenging her certainty that others are first and foremost a threat. Caitlin resists Mrs. Brook’s attempts, telling her that she is annoyed and bored: “Isn’t there an easier way to make friends?” (86).
Of course, there is not. Caitlin’s evolution begins with the chapter in which she shares her fond memories of watching To Kill a Mockingbird with her brother. Within that black-and-white (literally—the film is not in color) world she cannot be hurt by real events happening around her. She also does not have to be herself; she is Scout. In retreating into fiction, however, Caitlin misses the film’s larger message: She thinks the title “[is] the stupidest name ever for a movie” (80).
Devon tried to explain it to her: The world is full of menace, destroying innocent, harmless people without consequence or regard for their innocence. In the book, characters who mean no harm to anyone—Scout, Tom Robinson, Dill, even Boo Radley—are bullied, threatened, and mistreated. The novel teaches the importance of empathy or putting yourself in another person’s shoes—a cliché that confuses Caitlin later because, as she notes, everyone has different shoe sizes. For Caitlin the movie is simply about escaping into a perfect world with a perfect brother who never dies and a perfect father who never cries.
This section closes with a much different Caitlin than the Caitlin of the novel’s opening pages. She is happy at recess (previously a private hell for her), and she has actually made a friend, with whom she shares an emotional bond. They are both family survivors of the school shooting. Josh, the cousin of one of the shooters and a bully himself, even joins Michael and Caitlin, and Caitlin does not object despite her suspicions that Josh is mean. She practices the difficult lesson Mrs. Brook is teaching her. She makes eye contact with Josh, the very person she railed against as evil and monster. “Is Josh one of your friends?” she asks Michael (95). She puzzles over how Michael can be friends with the kid who pushes him around—with someone she sees as evil. The contradiction overwhelms her, but the moment also triggers an inexplicable rush of joy that suggests she is on to something big.
Friendship is a difficult concept for Caitlin, but she reasons that Michael has some mysterious pull over all these kids, using the concrete terms that she understands best: “It’s like his friends are tied to him with strings because they run to him from all directions and they all end up in front of me” (95). As they surround her, begging her to burp the ABCs, Caitlin feels not like Scout in her overalls but rather like Snow White—a figure from a fairy tale. Since Mockingbird itself has more in common with Harper Lee’s coming-of-age story, the Snow White reference is a strong indication that Caitlin’s apparent happiness here has come too easily.
