Name
Period
Allusions
To Kill a Mockingbird
When Calpurnia tells Jem and Scout she is going to take them to church with her, Scout recalls a
not-very-nice trick her Sunday school class once played on Eunice Ann Simpson. They tied her
to a chair in the furnace room and then went off and forgot her until Eunice managed to make a
ruckus, disrupting the service upstairs and saying she didn’t want to “play Shadrach any more.”
This expression, “play Shadrach,” is an allusion to a story in the Bible’s Old Testament in which
three Hebrew children named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into a fiery furnace
by the king and are later found unharmed.
Allusions are references made to something or someone in another time or place or in another
piece of writing. An author frequently uses allusions to relate something else to what is presently
happening in a story. It is a form of imagery like similes, metaphors, and personification.
Common things to which a writer might allude are Biblical stories, stories from mythology,
legends, and history. Sometimes titles of books are themselves allusions, such as John
Steinbeck’s East of Eden (from the Bible) and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
(from a poem by John Donne).
Activity
The following is a list of allusions. Name the famous person(s), or place(s), fictional or real, to
which these phrases refer.
1. “To be or not to be, that is the question.”
2. Bloody Mary
3. The Third Reich
4. Il Duce
5. Good Queen Bess
6. The Genius of Menlo Park
7. “I Have a Dream”
8. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”
9. David and his harp
10. Garden of Eden
11. der Führer
12. star-crossed lovers
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