TL;DR: The novel's principal antagonist. Patriarch of the Ewell clan, who lives by the Maycomb dump in a shack ringed by junk and red geraniums in slop jars. Drinks the relief check. Beats his daughter Mayella and then accuses Tom Robinson of doing it. Wins his trial — and immediately begins ruining what he has won, ending on a road home from a Halloween pageant where he attacks two children.

Spoiler level: medium. Discusses his death and the Halloween attack in plain terms.

Snapshot

Robert E. Lee "Bob" Ewell is a small wiry red-faced man who lives at the edge of Maycomb in conditions the town has agreed to look the other way about. He is the father of Mayella and seven younger children. He has not held steady work in years. His Halloween-night decision to attack the Finch children on the road home from the school pageant — and what happens to him under the live oaks as a result — is the climax of the novel.

Role in the story

Bob is the novel's antagonist and the rare character whose function is almost entirely as a wound the story is built around. He is the false accuser in the trial that drives Part Two. He spits in Atticus's face on a sidewalk in Chapter 22. He is fired from a WPA job for laziness in Chapter 27. He stalks Helen Robinson on her walks home from work until Mr. Link Deas runs him off. He attempts to break into Judge Taylor's house on a Sunday night. And on Halloween, in Chapter 28, he meets two small children on a dark road home from the school pageant and tries to do what he has been telling the town he would do.

Personality in plain English

Cruel, lazy, foul-mouthed, mean-tempered, alcoholic. Vulgar in court — sketches the scene on the wall behind the witness chair, laughs into the chair, addresses the courtroom in obscenities. Cowardly: he attacks the children on a dark road weeks after the verdict, rather than confront Atticus on the day. Predatory toward women and children. The book treats him without sentimentality — he is not redeemed, not pitied, not interestingly complicated. He is the moral floor Mayella stands on.

What he wants

To matter. To be feared by Maycomb the way he is feared inside his own shack. The trial gives him, for a few weeks, the most public attention he has ever had — and once it is over he cannot tolerate going back to being ignored.

What he fears

Being humiliated. Atticus's cross-examination of Mayella in Chapter 18 — particularly Atticus's question about whether her father ever beat her — does the humiliation Bob never recovers from. Everything he does in the back half of the book is in response to that one question.

Key relationships

• Mayella Ewell — his daughter. The book leaves the abuse implicit but unmistakable.
• Tom Robinson — his target. The accusation is, by the book's quiet design, the alibi for what Bob himself has done.
• Atticus Finch — his nemesis. Bob loses his trial and wins his verdict in the same week and somehow loses ground anyway. His subsequent spit-in-the-face on the post-office sidewalk is the action of a man who cannot quite figure out how he is the one who feels worse off.
• Sheriff Heck Tate — who testifies in the trial and removes Bob's body from a field on Halloween night.
• Judge John Taylor, Mr. Link Deas, Helen Robinson — the people he tries to menace in the weeks after the trial.

Visual identity

Short — Lee calls him "a little bantam cock of a man." Wiry rather than bulky. Red-faced, permanently flushed. Bright reddish-ginger hair under a low forehead. A "crowing voice." Heavy ginger brows; small close-set pale watery blue eyes deep beneath them. A medium-broad nose with broken capillaries and a slightly bulbous red tip. Square jaw, a forward-thrust chin, permanent grimace. Bad teeth — yellowed, gapped, one upper front chipped — visible when he sneers; spittle at the corners. Sunburn-red across the nose and cheekbones; never clean. Filthy fingernails with dark grime crescents. A faint scar across the right cheek. Daily uniform: filthy faded dark denim overalls, a stained undershirt beneath, bare grimy feet or scuffed brown brogans, a battered dark felt hat. For court: a slightly cleaner work shirt buttoned at the throat over the same overalls, hair plastered down with water.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Bob Ewell (canonical — the most common form)
• Robert E. Lee Ewell
• Mr. Ewell

Discussion questions

• Bob wins his trial and almost immediately begins ruining himself. What is the book saying about what a win like that does to a man like Bob?
• Atticus refuses to take Bob's threat seriously and says he is glad to "take that beating off somebody, [rather than] that household full of children." Is the book endorsing that calm or quietly critiquing it?
• Bob's central decision — to attack the Finch children on Halloween night rather than confront Atticus directly — is the act of a coward. What does it tell us about what he understood about the trial?
• The book never lets us inside Bob's head. We see him only from the outside, through Scout's eyes and the testimony of others. What would the book lose if Lee had given Bob a single sympathetic moment?
• The Ewells live "by the dump" — the spatial metaphor is almost too easy. What does Lee complicate about the metaphor in Mayella's testimony and Tom's account of the chiffarobe?