About Books: ‘Go Set a Watchman ’: Atticus Finch as anti-hero

By Sierra Trujillo

“For thus hath the Lord said unto me,Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”
Go Set a Watchman is the quickly but highly anticipated second novel from Harper Lee, a sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. Watchman is set 20 years after the events of Mockingbird, in which Jean Louise “Scout” Finch must act as her own “watchman” when returning to Maycomb, Alabama for a summer to be spent with her father.
A bit of background… It was announced in the summer of 2014 that the manuscript of a novel by Lee was found in a safe-deposit box and would be published as a sequel to Mockingbird in July of 2015. Lee, however, had stated in the past that she did not intend to pen any more novels. So what gives?
In most cases, it is said that Watchman was actually written as a first draft of what eventually turned into Mockingbird, and was not intended to be published. The first part of this remains true in all scenarios: Watchman was written first and then set aside. In other stories, it is said that because Lee’s sister and lawyer Alice Lee passed away in 2014 she no longer had the representation to deny such the publication, so the company was just waiting for the right time. My personal opinion: a little of both.
If the fact that Lee may or may not have wanted the book published does not leave a sour taste in your mouth, what comes next probably will. If you are anything like me, you looked at Atticus Finch as a higher power, the moral right, the North star. At some point, we have all wanted to name a son Atticus after the man. But, Watchman turns everything we ever thought about him upside down.
Jean Louise finds Atticus at a town meeting in which men are discussing how best to handle the allegation that a black man in town committed a crime. And Atticus, who was praised in Mockingbird for his “colorblindness” is right in the mix of it. He says that he will defend the man so that the NAACP does not get involved. So he’s not defending the man because he cares that he may have been wrongfully accused, but because it’ll keep the anti-segregationists out of town.
If you can get past this, I find that there are two ways in which you can read this book, and when I read it, I found myself going back and forth between the two ideas, not sure which was how I saw it, or wanted to see it.
There’s the first, in which you can see it as the literal sequel of Mockingbird. In this case, it’s a hard read. The time frames do not quite add up, especially with the number of years that pass between the two novels. There are facts that are completely different from Mockingbird, such as the result of the trial as well as Mayella Ewell’s age at the time of the alleged rape. There is the obvious disappointment that Atticus is not the moral compass that we always believed he was and would forever be. And there is the overall feeling that something is missing, and probably more than one somethings. Often times I found myself asking “why?” and not in the good way of a novel making you think, but in a way of something not being explained to its fullest capacity.
Then, there is the second way you can look at the book, which I find to be much more interesting. We know that this book was actually written before Mockingbird, and that fact alone makes it quite fascinating. Supposedly, Lee was able to create all of Mockingbird from a small snippet of the past Scout remembers in Watchman. That’s amazing. How did she get there? How did she (and maybe an editor or two) decide that this one tiny aspect would make for a much better book? (Which, I do believe that To Kill a Mockingbird was much better than Go Set a Watchman.)
Then once you begin reading and do find the discrepancies it makes you think: why did she decide to change this fact? Because, if the stories are true, Lee did not have the chance to edit any of Watchman before it was published, so discrepancies that may exist because there was a change during the process of creating Mockingbird could be there because of the fact that it was a first draft.
I do not know which one these ways I side with more; I really do go back and forth between being frustrated at the lack of explanation (I think Watchman could have been at least 100 pages longer) and then entranced with the questions of how Lee got from Watchman to Mockingbird.