Our Secret By John Edgar Wideman Analysis

In this essay I am going to discuss the issue of individual responsibility for criminal behavior, for this, I will focus my attention on different essays. The first essay “Our Time” written by John Edgar Wideman where he attempts to communicate the emotion that he felt and what his brother Robby went through. In this essay, he focused on explaining what happened to his brother. He writes about the forces that contributed to his brother's bad behavior that automatically lead him to do bad things and ended up in the jail for the rest of his life. Also, Wideman writes about how the pressures of his community and culture that was rooted in the history of oppression and racism affected Robby. The second essay “Our Secret” written by Susan Griffin,
in this essay she takes us (the readers) back in time to find out the reasons behind Heinrich Himmler’s behavior and thoughts. What led him to become one of the most terrible men of human history.
One of the rules of life is that everyone should have the responsibility to accept the consequences of their actions, being these good or bad, and it was exactly what happened to Wideman’s brother, Robby. Robby lived in Homewood where he had many friends, but among these friends he had a good friend named Garth. Garth was a guy that was always there to support and advise him with cheerful words “You could depend on Garth to say something to make you feel good, even though you knew he was lying” (Wideman 659). But when Robby tragically lost his close friend Garth to death because the doctors misdiagnosed his illness, “The ignorance of white witch doctors who, by misdiagnosing Garth’s illness, had sealed his doom” (661), it seemed like that the death of Garth took a part of him also, “They had killed Garth, and his dying had killed part of his son” (666). He had lost his support, and it unleashed a negative light over Robby’s own perspective of life, he was already bitter with the world and had a pessimistic attitude about it