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Ethos
Part 2, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—The Revival:
When Henry picks Jean Louise up for a swim date at Finch's Landing in Part 2, Chapter 5, they reminisce about their childhood in the car, during which Lee inserts a flashback:
Henry smiled. "I was jealous of him. He had you and Jem to himself all summer long, while I had to go home the day school was out. There was nobody at home to fool around with."
She was silent. Time stopped, shifted, and went lazily in reverse. Somehow, then, it was always summer. Hank was down at his mother's and unavailable, and Jem had to make do with his younger sister for company. The days were long, Jem was eleven, and the pattern was set.
From there follows an extended scene in which Jem and Scout play with their neighbor Dill and hold a pretend religious revival.
The flashback affects the narrative present, as Lee attempts to show how Jean Louise is particularly reflective upon first returning to Maycomb after several years. Pulling her back into reality, Lee marks the time that has passed as she was lost in reminiscence:
Car wheels running from pavement to dirt roused her...
"We're almost there," said Henry. "Where were you? Back in New York with your boyfriend?"
"Just woolgathering," she said. "I was thinking about that one time we held a revival. You missed that one."
To "woolgather" is to get lost in one's thoughts or to daydream. This term will reappear many times throughout the novel.
Part 4, Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—Knocked Up:
In a flashback scene in Part 4, Chapter 11, there is a moment of dramatic irony when Jean Louise talks with her friend Ada Louise after having been kissed by Albert in the schoolyard:
Ada Louise explains the steps necessary to make a baby:
"Well, first of all it takes a boy. Then he hugs you tight and breathes real hard and then he French-kisses you. That's when he kisses you and opens his mouth and sticks his tongue in your mouth—"
A ringing noise in her ears obliterated Ada Belle's narratives. She felt the blood leave her face. Her palms grew sweaty and she tried to swallow. She would not leave. If she left they would know it [...] There was no mistaking it, Albert had stuck out his tongue at her. She was pregnant.
The reader most likely knows that kissing does not make one pregnant, and this makes the effect of the scene quite comical, as Jean Louise proceeds to spiral based on this misinformation. Especially humorous is the way she frames the event as Albert sticking his tongue out at her, an often mean-spirited and silly gesture that is quite the opposite of what Albert was intending. Compared to the real, structural problems Jean Louise is addressing today, inserting this episode offers a bit of levity for the reader.
Part 6, Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Commencement Dance :
In Part 6, Chapter 15, Lee uses flashback as Jean Louise eats an ice cream, observes her surroundings, and remembers the simpler days of her past:
Sitting in the one o'clock sun, she rebuilt her house, populated the yard with her father and brother and Calpurnia, put Henry across the street and Miss Rachel next door.
It was the last two weeks of the school year and she was going to her first dance.
Rather than simply inserting a flashback and hoping the reader will follow, Lee makes the act of "flashing back" a scene in itself, where her character reconstructs a past scene and imposes it on the present. At the end of the chapter, which directly follows the end of the flashback, Jean Louise comes back to "reality":
Thock. She flattened the paper cup into the table, shattering their images. The sun stood at two o'clock, as it had stood yesterday and would stand tomorrow.
At once, there is a sense of irrevocable temporal distance from the flashback scenes and a sense that nothing has changed. What could have changed if the sun still rises and falls, same as ever? This is a paradox that Jean Louise continually faces in the novel.
