What This Theme Explores
Nature vs. nurture in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle examines whether character and destiny spring from inborn temperament or can be reshaped by training, environment, and love. The novel refuses a simple binary: instincts and genetic inheritance may set the grain of a being, but careful guidance can plane or polish that grain without changing the wood itself. This becomes a moral question as much as a scientific one—what do we owe the creatures we shape, and how far can we push them against their bent? The story suggests that nurture channels nature’s current, but rarely reverses it for long.
How It Develops
From the beginning, the Sawtelle project is conceived as an experiment in heredity on one hand and training on the other. John Sawtelle’s Mendelian curiosity in A Handful of Leaves sets the “nature” premise, while Trudy Sawtelle perfects a method of shaping behavior that turns genetic promise into reliable temperament. Even the human family mirrors this split: the brothers Gar and Claude, “as different as night and day,” embody innate divergence that training and circumstance only amplify.
The arrival of the stray Forte in The Stray turns theory into choice. Is a dog stamped by the wild redeemable through patience, or is danger hardwired? The family’s argument echoes through the correspondence collected in The Letters from Fortunate Fields, where Alvin Brooks defends pure lineage and controlled experiments while the Sawtelles defend a more intuitive practice that pairs keen eye with rigorous training.
As Edgar Sawtelle flees into the Chequamegon forest, the kennel’s structured “nurture” is stripped away and instinct surfaces—his and the dogs’. The survival trial reveals both the strength and limits of conditioning: the dogs’ learned signals and discipline persist, but they are now braided with hunger, fear, and pack logic. By the end, Claude’s fixed darkness and the dogs’ bred capacities suggest that nature’s deep patterns persist beneath—even through—the most exacting nurture, a truth that gives the novel’s tragedy its inexorable pull.
Key Examples
The novel grounds its philosophy in scenes where choices about training collide with temperament and lineage.
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The Foundation of the Sawtelle Breed: John Sawtelle’s vision builds on Mendelian predictability—selecting for courage, responsiveness, and steady nerves—asserting that careful breeding can fix desirable traits. Yet Trudy’s training proves those traits are only potential until nurtured into consistent behavior, highlighting that genetics set a range while practice calibrates the instrument.
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The Debate Over the Stray: When the family confronts Forte’s wariness, Claude argues that a brutal past hardens a dog beyond reform, while Gar insists trust can be patiently earned. Their debate reframes “wildness” as a test case: is fear a permanent trait or a protective learning that can be unlearned in the right hands?
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The Letters from Fortunate Fields: Alvin Brooks champions pure pedigree and controlled crosses, warning that intuition produces a “jumble,” while John defends a method that identifies excellence wherever it appears and then cultivates it. The exchange sharpens the novel’s ethic: the best dogs emerge where innate gifts and intentional shaping meet, not from either alone.
Character Connections
Gar and Claude Sawtelle are a living thesis and antithesis. Gar’s trust in creatures—canine and human—reflects a temperament oriented toward patience and care; his choices reinforce that gentleness rather than altering it. Claude’s manipulative pragmatism, by contrast, appears less learned than revealed; as circumstances give him latitude, his nature darkens into action, suggesting experience can sharpen an inner blade more than it can blunt it.
Trudy embodies nurture’s craft at its most artful. Her precision training translates potential into reliability, proving how context and method can elicit the best version of a creature. Yet her fierce need to keep the family whole—“in her nature from the start”—becomes the pressure point Claude exploits, showing how an innate disposition toward care can be turned against itself.
Edgar’s muteness defines him at birth, but his expressive fluency is made by instruction and practice, especially through the system formalized in Signs. In the woods, Edgar’s learned signals mesh with primal survival sense, illustrating how nurture can become second nature without erasing the first. His arc suggests identity is not a choice between nature and nurture but a layered collaboration between them.
The Sawtelle dogs are the book’s most persuasive argument. Their intelligence and steadiness arise from long selection, but their responsiveness to complex commands—and to human emotion—exists only because years of training coax it forward. They are purpose-built partners who prove that the richest capacities emerge where inheritance meets disciplined, ethical handling.
Symbolic Elements
The Sawtelle Kennel: A living laboratory where pedigrees are planned and behaviors shaped, the kennel embodies the thesis that excellence requires both careful selection and sustained teaching. Its order and routines dramatize how nurture can sculpt raw endowment into dependable character.
The Chequamegon Forest: The wilderness strips away human scaffolding, exposing what remains when training is tested by hunger, fear, and weather. It becomes a proving ground where instinct asserts itself—and where well-taught habits either hold or fray under pressure.
The Poison: Introduced in the Prologue, the poison mimics a natural death while enacting a murderous will, collapsing the boundary between fate and choice. It symbolizes the corruption of “nature” by a human intention that disguises itself as inevitability, twisting the theme’s central question into a moral indictment.
Contemporary Relevance
Nature vs. nurture continues to shape debates in genetics, education, criminal justice, and parenting. The novel offers a humane lens on these controversies, asking not only what is inborn but what obligations arise once we commit to shape another being. By rooting the question in the intimate partnership between people and dogs, it models an ethic: respect the grain of character, train with patience, and acknowledge limits. In an age of predictive algorithms and gene editing, the story warns that technique without moral cultivation risks amplifying what is worst in us.
Essential Quote
“To create better dogs, we will have to become better people.”
This line crystallizes the novel’s argument that methods and pedigrees are not enough; the moral nature of the trainer shapes the outcomes of training. It insists that nurture is never value-neutral: the character of the nurturer determines whether nature is guided toward partnership or weaponized for harm.