Brothers and Keepers (John Edgar Wideman)

The book Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman is the true account of a novelist about the fact that his brother is sentenced to prison for life for murder, something the novelist's brother tries to understand and with which he has to cope. The first question he considers is why his brother ends up in prison while he goes a very different direction in life. He further questions the meaning of criminal behavior and how it develops. He examines the nature of the prison system. He must learn to cope with that system as a visitor, an outsider who is given insight by his visits and by letters written by his brother from the inside.

There have been many theories offered to explain why some people become criminals, and the author looks to some of these theories to give him the answer as to why his brother has become a criminal and he has not. There is always in his desire to find this answer a certain sense of guilt, as if he has failed to help his brother or as if he should have followed the same path in life. The two were raised in the same house, they have the same parents, they lived in the same neighborhood as children, and therefore they had many of the same experiences. There are several theories of how the environment influences the development of criminal behavior, but both brothers have had the same environment for their formative years. Other theories try to find genetic reasons for criminal behavior, and yet these two brothers are close together genetically

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extravert, introvert, or ambivert (Bartol, 1991, pp. 40-41). An examination of Wideman's account will show where he and his brother might fall on this continuum. WIDEMAN Wideman begins with the proposition that he and his brother are much alike, with the same background and upbringing, and yet they have diverged at some point. He wants to find that point, to understand what it was that caused his brother to go one way and he another. However, as he discusses the matter it becomes clear that his brother and he have different personalities, and they would thus have reacted to their environment in different ways according to Eysenck's theory. The nature of the brother's personality is actually revealed in the first paragraph of the book, an introductory paragraph before the main body of the book begins in which the brother talks about how he behaved when he was six or seven years old and walking down the street looking at passing cars and wishing he could buy them for the change in his pocket. He feels now that what he was doing then was looking at the world in an unrealistic way, a way that made the world easier and that made things have less value so they could be acquired without worthwhile effort: What I'm trying to sa

Category: Literature - B