What is your opinion of Dill? What are the things you like or don't like about him? Remembering when you were his age, is there anything you can identify with in his personality?

I don't have much of an opinion about Dill either way; he definitely isn't one of my favorite characters in the novel, but not because his part in it isn't well written....... I've just never warmed to him. Here is shmoops' take on Dill;

Charles Baker Harris (Dill)

Character Analysis

For Scout and Jem, summer means Dill, and Dill’s imagination: "Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies" (1.39). While the Finch kids, despite their imaginative flights of fancy, are firmly entrenched in the reality of Maycomb, Dill’s outsider status causes him to see the Maycomb community from a different perspective.

This becomes most clear at Tom Robinson’s trial. While Scout accepts Mr. Gilmer’s rude treatment of Tom on the witness stand as normal, Dill starts crying uncontrollably at the injustice of Tom’s being treated so differently from the white witnesses. He can’t quite explain his feelings, but Mr. Raymond can.

"Things haven't caught up with that one's instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won't get sick and cry […] about the simple hell people give other people – without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too." (20.20-22)

Dill’s sensitivity to Maycomb’s intolerance gives Scout, and the reader, a different model of how to respond to what’s happening. The contrast between Dill’s angry tears and Scout’s justification of Mr. Gilmer’s attitude with the surprisingly callous “he's just a Negro” (19.164) suggests that Scout’s already been hit with Maycomb’s ugly racism stick – that neither being a child nor being Atticus’s daughter has been enough to shield her entirely from her community’s prejudices. Or maybe she’s just trying to comfort Dill.

While Scout and Jem struggle after the trial to make sense of the Maycomb community that they thought they knew so well, and to figure out their own place in it, Dill’s outsider status allows him to take a more detached approach.

"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown […] There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off."

"You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them."

"Well I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.” (22.60-64)

While Mr. Raymond predicts that Dill will grow out of crying into not caring, Dill himself comes up with a different path, hiding the tears in laughter. Both responses, however, are difficult for Scout to understand. Dill’s character suggests what the limitations of Scout’s perspective might be, giving the reader a broader picture of what’s the matter with Maycomb through the different limitations of Dill’s viewpoint.