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 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Devon’s Chest”
Content Warning: The Chapter 5 and 6 Summaries, as well as the Chapters 1-8 Analysis, contain references to a school shooting and graphic descriptions of gunshot injuries.
Caitlin describes a cabinet that her brother Devon and her father worked on. It was Devon’s Eagle Scout project. At this point, the cabinet is still pretty much a frame, making it a perfect space to crawl into. Caitlin does not offer particulars but says only that “Devon is gone” (2).
The unfinished chest is covered with a gray sheet: “It looked like a one-winged bird crouching in the corner of our living room” (1). Caitlin often draws the dresser with her charcoal pencils. She says that now there is a weight on her, something that holds her down and keeps her from floating away like a bird.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Look at the Person”
Caitlin’s family and friends and even people from her elementary school gather in her house. Caitlin’s father assures her that the town wants to help her. But Caitlin says she would rather not talk with them; she would prefer to hide in her brother’s room, where she has not been allowed since Devon’s death.
Among those at the house is Mrs. Brook, Caitlin’s counselor. Caitlin, mindful of her manners, tries to manage conversations, but it is a struggle. She shoves candy into her mouth to avoid chatting. She finds her father and snuggles up under her father’s sweater, wishing she “could stay there forever” (9).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Let’s Talk About It”
It is time for Caitlin to go back to school. She sits in Mrs. Brook’s office studying the facial expressions chart on the wall. Caitlin knows people have a hard time understanding her because she has Asperger’s, so she works hard studying their faces and trying to understand their emotions. As a rule, she likes to keep to her “Personal Space” (11). Mrs. Brook chats with Caitlin about how difficult the funeral service must have been and how important it is to show her emotions. Caitlin notes how her father cries a lot. Mrs. Brook asks Caitlin if she misses her brother. Caitlin says that “He’s not completely gone” (14). She is referring to the fact that her brother was cremated and that bits of his ashes probably still float about in the air.
Caitlin grows fascinated with the wooden table where she sits. It reminds her of Devon’s Eagle Scout project. She starts to rub the wood with her fingers. A splinter cuts her, and the sight of blood sends her into a frenzy. “I have to erase the blood” (18), she says before she loses touch with her surroundings.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Life”
When she gets home, Caitlin finds her father has already talked to Mrs. Brook about her “Tantrum Rage Meltdown” (19). As her father tries to ask about what happened in the office, Caitlin disconnects and begins to count in her head. She then thinks about her stuffed animals, which calms her. She heads to her bedroom and falls asleep still counting.
When she wakes it is past dinner time, and she and her father eat Pop-Tarts and salad. Caitlin says how much she wishes Devon could be with them. After dinner, Caitlin takes out her sketchpad and draws.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Personal Space”
At school the next day, Caitlin prepares to head out for recess. She dislikes it: too much chaos. She watches as Josh, a bully in her grade, menaces kids on the monkey bars. She recalls that Josh’s cousin was one of the shooters at Devon’s school. The police killed the other shooter.
Caitlin is angry at Josh for pushing kids around, but she tries to handle her anger by doing something she calls “stuffed-animaling” (28). She takes anything she is looking at and blurs it with her eyes until it changes into “fuzzy and warm” blobs instead of sharp and cold angles (28). Josh walks by with a big grin, a facial expression Caitlin cannot decode. He confronts her about her staring at him, and Caitlin tells him he should not invade someone’s personal space. Josh assumes that, like everyone else, Caitlin blames him for the school shooting. He tells a shocked Caitlin that when Devon arrived at the hospital, his chest had been shot open and his heart was hanging out. There was nothing the doctors could have done. Caitlin hears herself screaming loudly.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Heart”
Intrigued by what Josh said, Caitlin later checks out more than 30 books from the public library on how the heart works. She has always been a voracious reader: “Books are not like people. Books are safe” (34). She pores over the books, fascinated by all the new words. Hearts, she learns, are fragile things that need to be taken of. The books are clear about one thing: “A gunshot wound to the Heart is almost always fatal” (37).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Groups
Caitlin’s teacher announces a group project. The assignment is to research any animal. Caitlin declines to work in a group, saying, “I’m my own group” (39). When the teacher assigns Caitlin to a group, Caitlin resists and is sent to Mrs. Brook’s office. Mrs. Brook tells Caitlin that she needs to follow instructions and that the project is not really about animals but rather about learning how to make friends. Caitlin tells Mrs. Brook that the kids in school always tell her to leave them alone and that her friends are her dictionary, her television, and her computer. Her teacher ultimately allows Caitlin to work by herself, but Mrs. Brook tells Caitlin that someday she will make somebody a great friend.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Bambi”
At home Caitlin keeps to herself. She can hear her father crying to himself most nights out in the living room. Caitlin stays in her room and watches old Disney movies. She decides on Bambi. She remembers the first time she watched it when she only five and how she knew what her brother could not figure out: Bambi’s mother was dead even if the movie did not show that hunters had killed her. Caitlin’s own mother had died two years earlier, so she knew that when mothers die they don’t come back.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
These opening chapters introduce the reader to Caitlin Smith: how she thinks, how she feels, and how she handles other people and difficult moments. Caitlin serves as a first-person narrator, and in this decision to use the voice of a character who is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, the novel seeks to create a bond between the reader and Caitlin.
That bond might seem ironic, as Caitlin admits repeatedly that she maintains her “Private Space” and that other kids treat her differently and make her feel self-conscious. In her showdown with Mrs. Brook over the group project, Caitlin says she is willing to do it with her real friends—the computer, her dictionary, and the television. These opening chapters work to bridge the gap between Caitlin and the (presumed) neurotypical reader while preserving Caitlin’s unique worldview and mannerisms. Her sentences are concise and careful. Caitlin capitalizes letters in odd places, setting up her voice as distinctive. Conversations and dialogue employ italics rather than quotes to suggest Caitlin’s own distance from such communication. Since Caitlin herself is in full retreat from the reality of the school shooting, the first mention of Devon’s killing does not occur until page 27, when Caitlin sees Josh, the cousin of one of the shooters.
This scene exemplifies how the novel handles Caitlin’s Asperger’s—or, more precisely, how the first-person narration allows the reader to share Caitlin’s emotional complexity. When she sees Josh, she wants to moan, scream, shake, go under a table, or spin around over and over. Her eyes feel hot and itchy. Her heart races and pounds. Her vision blurs everything. The reader has a first-hand account of how a child with Asperger’s struggles to contain and direct a surge of emotions. Even Caitlin’s sentence structure collapses into stream-of-consciousness constructions.
These opening chapters therefore place the reader in a position that is neither that of Caitlin’s classmates (who treat her as strange) nor that of the friends and neighbors who gather for Devon’s memorial service (who treat her as unintelligent). The first-person narration challenges readers to do what Caitlin herself commits to learning: to empathize. In sharing her brother’s unfinished Eagle Scout project, in recording her father’s crying every night, and in negotiating the confusion and chaos of the playground, Caitlin becomes a character rather than a case study in autism. She is fascinated by words and by making sure that the dictionary definition (she carries her dictionary everywhere) matches its usage. She is literal: When the playground monitor urges the kids to hurry back into the school, she tells them to shake a leg, which confuses Caitlin because shaking your leg would make everyone stop moving.
That literal sense defines Caitlin’s introduction to the idea of empathy—or “opening one’s heart.” A heart is a muscle that, in her brother’s case, was shot open by a bullet. “His Heart was hanging out” (31), Josh tells her. Her brother’s Eagle Scout project is a variation on the motif: It is literally an empty chest, a chest without a heart.
Despite Caitlin’s efforts to learn more about the heart—she makes a list of words she needs to learn in order to understand it—emotions remain messy things to her: “That’s why emotions are evil and I hate them! Especially crying. I don’t Get It” (42). The more Caitlin studies the facial expressions chart in Mrs. Brook’s office, the more puzzled she is by the contradictions in people’s actions and the unpredictability of their motives. At this point, Caitlin is not ready to accept that complex reality—she hides in her brother’s room or in the warm folds of her father’s sweater or in her game of stuffed-animaling. These opening chapters end with Caitlin’s recollection of watching Bambi and getting upset at Devon because he cannot accept the reality of the death of Bambi’s mother. She was not sensitive to the fact that their mother’s death meant more to him. His resistance to the absoluteness of death triggered a tantrum, after which her father told Caitlin that she must learn to think like others. This was Caitlin’s first lesson in empathy, and it is also the first that the novel offers to readers.
