The fundamental meat at the center of Conrad Richter’s most famous novel, The Light in the Forest, is similar to that at the center of Thomas Berger’s most famous novel, Little Big Man. Except for the backbone of the plot, that is the only thing the two novels share. Berger’s is a great big ironically comically picaresque view of a white boy raised by “Indians” who must assimilate into a white society he doesn’t know as a young man. Richter’s novel covers essentially the same territory except that it is much more narrowly focused and not intended as a comic portrait. The irony is still there and that is the meat of the matter.
The Light in the Forest is based on a true story that occurred near the time of the Revolutionary War rather than during the period in which Americans were settling the frontier by spreading westward which is the setting for Little Big Man. While both novels are about boys abducted by native American tribes and raised within that culture who face difficulties in the process of retuning to white society, Richter published his novel a decade earlier. While that hardly seems like a significant gap, in terms of the world into which those novels entered, it the gap may as well have been fifty years. Richter tells his story of the attempted enforced assimilation a white boy raised within native culture with complete sincerity. The focus is strictly upon the processes of getting John Butler away from the “savages” and back into civilization.
If anyone still doubts the power of nurture over nature, however, one need only conduct the research into cases exactly like this. The facts are irrefutable: most children who abducted and raise by native tribes failed at attempts to re-integrate into the white society from which they were torn not because they couldn’t, but because they didn’t want to. They identified more strongly with the culture that raised them than the culture that was “in their blood” to speak. Such is the case with the boy born John Butler who becomes the man named True Son. Such is the case Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man. That’s the story that binds them. Now let’s get to that meat.
The meat at the center of both novels is, as indicated, irony. In the case of Little Big Man, it is a persistently comic irony, but the fundamental irony of both novels is identical. That irony is that the stories are the reverse of what is expected. When hearing of a white boy raised abducted and raised within a non-white culture, it is perhaps only to be expected that given the chance he would want to return to those who look more like him. And that might well be true in other cases, but these are specifically stories about white children raised by “Indians.” That term is appropriate here because that is where the irony lies. Each story flips the expectations engendered by the mythologizing of the American west in which it is the white pioneers who are the preferred representatives of civilization and humanity.
Both Berger and Richter construct their stories of the rejection of white society by these white boys raised in an “alien” culture so that it is not just—it is not merely—nurture winning out over nature that guides the feeling of belonging. Both John Butler and Jack Crabbe turn their backs on the white society from which they were taken and to which it is expected they have always wanted to return in large part as a conscious rejection of the inhumanity they associate with it. Butler—like Jack Crabbe though to a far lesser extent—is an eyewitness to the instigation of what will soon be a concerted effort at genocide of the very people he calls family.
