What are examples of parallelism found in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? What are the page numbers?

Parallelism is a literary device in which a writer or speaker creates sentences made up of parts that are grammatically the same or at least similar in terms of "construction, sound, meaning or meter" (Literary Devices, "Parallelism"). Parallelism is especially created through repetition. The Literary Devices dictionary gives us the example, "Alice ran into the room, into the garden, and into our hearts." Here, the repetition of prepositional phrases beginning with "into" creates parallel structure. In To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee frequently uses parallelism to establish tone and develop themes

One example of parallelism can be found in the first chapter. In her narration, Scout describes Maycomb and its society during the Great Depression. One thing she notes is that days seemed to be longer because "people moved slowly" as they "ambled across the square." She particularly uses parallelism in the following description:

There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.

Here, beginning multiple phrases with a negative, such as "no," "nowhere," and "nothing," creates repetition, thereby also creating parallelism. Through the parallelism, Scout depicts the financial distress the town is in while also depicting the generally relaxed attitude of the town's citizens. The townspeople are not in a panicked frenzy as one might expect them to be during such a devastating time period; instead, they feel relaxed and a sense of optimism that helps set the tone of the rest of the novel.

A second example of parallelism can be found in Chapter 23, soon after the trial. Aunt Alexandra offends Scout by denying her permission to play with Walter Cunningham and calling him "trash." In an effort to appease Scout, Jem tries to explain their aunt's point of view by explaining what he has come to understand about the different types of people in the world:

I've thought about it a lot lately and I've got it all figured out. There's four kinds of folks in the world. There's the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there's the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes. (Ch. 23)

Here, in each clause of the sentence, Jem's repetition of the contraction "there's" plus his repetition of the phrase "kind like" creates parallelism. Though Scout disagrees with his conclusions, his analysis of different people underscores a major theme in the book--differences in education levels creates differences in people that leads to prejudiced hatred.

As different published editions of the book will have different page numbers, only approximations can be given. The above passages are found in approximately the middle of the very first chapter and on approximately the second-to-last page of Chapter 23.