Go Set a Watchman was perhaps, in my life, the most awaited book ever (and I am a Potterhead). When I first read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school, driven to it by many Reader’s Digest articles, I found in Atticus Finch the person I wanted to look up to as a model of integrity and character, as I was growing up. He held himself as answerable only to himself and taught his children the same. He became the conscience keeper of the entire town, and all this through the eyes of a young girl, in whose shoes I was only too happy to put myself in.
While the early reviews did reveal that Atticus was going to
be portrayed as a racist, the book did surprise me in many of its aspects. The progression
from Scout to Jean- Louise didn’t seem all too strange- a tomboyish young girl,
imbibed with values of independent thinking, growing up to become a headstrong
young woman, ready to scandalise her reputation- holding aunt and continuing to
be a stranger among other women, most of whom were her own friends, at
coffee-parties, seemed like a natural progression. To me, it only seemed such a
natural progression that the Atticus of To Kill A Mockingbird would age to be
the Atticus of Go Set A Watchman. And here’s why I think so.
Atticus has become an old man who, from being someone that stood
for justice for Blacks, now attends meetings that look at ways of maintaining
segregation. From individuals, an entire race has become just that in Atticus’s
eyes- a race. While Jean- Louise copes with her discovery of her knowledge that
the person who taught to respect and treat everyone equally and to turn a blind
eye to their colour has become an advocate for segregation, the similarities
between her and my world didn’t seem so far off.
Many people in my own life, who swore by the values of socialism
in their youth and in living as one with different communities, have
increasingly become close-minded in their appreciation of that same diversity. Much
of this transition has been fuelled by fears of losing out on the privileges
that belonged to them hitherto, much of these fears themselves baseless. In a
political era in which such fears and such antagonism is treated with
indifference, and sometimes even encouraged, values that were built on already instable
foundations and which were always under the pressure of an unsupporting society
would collapse and shatter, just like it did for Atticus. After the release of
GSAW, numerous are the allusions to instances in TKAM that could have exposed
traits in Atticus that would later be his characteristic. While I do not want
to go back to these instances, the reasons that Atticus puts forward for his current
stand seem relevant to understanding the position of many in our age as well. This
is where Go Set A Watchman becomes important to us in India also.
At the end of the book, when Jean Louise is seen as staying
back in Maycomb, I hope she will be the conscience keeper of the town now. I know
that is the only reason why I would want to stay back in Maycomb- for me to
become its conscience keeper.
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