Naeem Murr’s novel, The Boy, is a story about a boy that is put into foster homes all of his life. This boy is exposed to all different kinds of influences that affects his life in a negative way. These are the things that cause the argument in the story; is the boy evil or not? The argument comes because of an existing psychological argument, nature vs. nurture. This is an argument on whether people are the way they are because of the way they were raised or the way they were born. Many psychologists today believe that people are the way they are because of a combination of nature and nurture. I believe that the argument in this book can be solved with this belief. The nurture of this boy is considered by me to be detrimental and can be the reason that he is labeled "evil." When a kid is growing up, he or she learns from watching others and imitating or reacting to them. This is why the way the boy acts can be blamed on nurture; the way he was brought up. The boy experienced things in his early life that is upsetting just to hear about. Putting kids up for adoption is enough to cause them to life that is considered evil, and that is just the start for this boy. The boy’s father causes him to be evil by never loving him or even caring for him. Sean doesn’t want the boy so he never loves him and doesn’t care about what is best for him. The boy is refereed to as "the vague shadow in the upper window of an ancient family home" (Murr 165). Living a life that no one loves you in is not only hard but it is enough to make you evil because we get our values from are loved ones. A foster home is not a good place for a child to be raised and that may be the reason for the way that the boy ends up, evil. Because in a foster home there are not many parental figures, kids that grow up in them are not taught how they should act. The boy didn’t have a parental figure so he was never taught right from wro...
