Go Set a Watchman: Part 7, Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

The poignancy of this scene for Jean Louise (and the reader) is that it combines an ideological argument (integration vs. segregation) with a personal one (an idealized father vs. a flawed, realistic one). Jean Louise now turns her temper on Aunt Alexandra, but is brought short at the sight of her tears. Alexandra, like Atticus, is human too.

One of the important conflicts of the book is Jean Louise accepting Atticus as a flawed human being, and we see that conflict in miniature with Aunt Alexandra as well. Jean Louise still disagrees with almost all of Alexandra’s opinions, but now she at least sees her as a human and a family member.

Uncle Jack’s blow serves its intended purpose—snapping Jean Louise out of her blind rage—but this doesn’t justify his violence, as the narrator seems to do. (Again the novel serves as a kind of historical document regarding the social world of the time, that it does excuse Jack’s physical blow.) The climax of the book is over, and now Jean Louise feels exhausted and lets Uncle Jack preach to her. Her conclusion is basically that she can’t beat Atticus, and she can’t join him—she can’t accept his views as right, but she also can’t disown him as the father who made her who she is.

Uncle Jack once again avoids the issues of racism and injustice, but now he focuses on Jean Louise’s personal conflict instead of states’ rights and the South’s identity. He saw all along that Jean Louise’s argument with Atticus also involved accepting Atticus as imperfect.

Uncle Jack now explicitly equates the “watchman” with one’s conscience—the idea of someone’s idea of right and wrong as separate from society’s influence. Jean Louise built up her conscience around Atticus’s integrity, while failing to recognize that this integrity might not extend beyond his personal interactions, and therefore meaning that she had no independent conscience of her own to lean back on when Atticus let her down.

Jean Louise had made Atticus her watchman, and so part of the pain of her disillusionment and the conflict of the novel involves her working to create a watchman within herself—a conscience apart from Atticus, and one that can even stand up directly in opposition to Atticus. Thus on one level all these arguments are also about Jean Louise finding her independence as an adult.

With the repetition of Jean Louise as “Childe Roland,” she is presented as a kind of epic hero on a quest to discover the ugly truth about her own family and hometown. She had built up Atticus as a god, and so had to “break her idols” by cursing at him and leaving.

Uncle Jack’s argument here is very flawed. Atticus supports the right of the Klan to march but not when they use violence, and yet there are many degrees of racism between free speech and lynching—segregation, systemic oppression, and differences in education and housing, for example. Jean Louise might technically be a “bigot” for refusing to accept the hate speech she heard at the citizens’ council meeting, but the white men at the meeting have all the power of society and government behind them, and so their bigotry has far-reaching effects over others’ lives, while Jean Louise’s does not. Yet the novel seems not to recognize this flaw in Jack’s argument.

The narrator presents Jean Louise as having somehow “learned her lesson,” but it is also clear that Uncle Jack’s explanation of the lesson is deeply flawed. Jack points out the contradiction between Atticus’s personal morality and racist politics, but doesn’t see anything hypocritical about it: he sees it all as just an old-fashioned philosophy about independence and responsibility. It’s easy and lazy to say there’s no justice in this world when you are a part of the group with all the advantages that let you enjoy this un-just world.

Here we see the limits of Jean Louise’s progressive ideas—she clearly isn’t “color blind” as Uncle Jack claims—and then Jack goes off on another tangent about why segregationists linger on the white fear of interracial marriage, yet in this tangent he seems to recognize that in any reasoned debate that an argument for racism is bound to lose. But it remains unclear what Jack sees as racism, as he seems blind to systematic, structural racism.

After this the ideological debates basically end, and the conflict returns to the personal one of Jean Louise facing a father she has tried to destroy, and one whom she must finally accept as human. This feels like “meeting him” for the first time, and it scares her.

Uncle Jack now makes an argument similar to Henry’s, but with more hope for change and room for Jean Louise’s firm principles. He asks her to become a useful citizen of Maycomb—like Hank—but to still hold her differing views, and so try to change others’ ideas on a personal level. Jack seems to disagree with Atticus’s racism, but to believe in change at a human, personal pace and scale rather than imposed by others or by law from without. This is the kind of integrity Atticus lives by, though it is reasonable to argue that though such a “tactic” might never effect real change on a larger scale. Hank is not Jean Louise’s “kind” because he doesn’t have a strong and fierce conscience—not because he is poor.

This is a random twist that adds little to the narrative of Watchman, and has no relation to Mockingbird either. We know almost nothing about Atticus’s wife, so there is no backstory to add any power to this revelation. Jean Louise and Jack end on a good note at least.