Abstract

This paper discusses the contemporary circumstances regarding the segregation between White and Black people in the southern part of America, which are manifested especially through the eyes of the children: Scout, Jem, and Dill from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Marguerite (Maya Angelou’s nickname) and Bailey from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. If Scout and the other children in To Kill a Mockingbird are recorded with a presumably easy and happy upbringing with an invulnerable position in a prejudiced white society, Maya and her brother in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are noted for a rather harsh childhood without the affection and secure placement in the same southern part of the country. The two narrating voices account for their experiences separately, being distinct as to races and occurrences, denoting their distinct positions in society. Nevertheless, several parallel phenomena observed in the two books suggest some common issues that every human being raised in the mid-nineteenth century underwent. The goal of this study is to compare them from the viewpoints of Black and White children. Therefore, this paper aims to explore social behaviour with the implications of apparent binary oppositions, which will be later deconstructed, concurring with Derrida’s idea of ‘inconsistent meaning’ within texts and language. In doing so, this paper juxtaposes the two aforementioned texts to identify the similarities in light of intertextuality, a poststructuralist theory that seeks to understand a text and its meaning through its relationship with other texts.