Milkweed Quotes

Character Development of Misha in Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli

A person’s personality comes from two main areas; nature, and nurture. The abstract story of Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli shows the development of the protagonist, Misha’s personality. Milkweed takes place during World War 2 in Warsaw, Poland, and follows Misha’s life like how he travels around to follow the Milgrom family, smuggles food to survive, as well as how he moved on with life after the war. In the novel Milkweed written by Jerry Spinelli, Misha’s character development is mainly from the nurture area as opposed to the nature area as his environment gives him a slight air of stupidity, curiosity, and different ways of doing certain things.

Misha isn’t the brightest during World War 2. Since Misha grew up without any guidance, he had to rely on where he lived to develop some sort of personality. Misha also never got proper education, just the bare

Misha doesn’t know what everything is or does and likes to find out though through some unethical means. An example of this is when Misha meets Janina, he hurls question after question to figure Janina out: “Then I asked, “‘Are you a Jew?’....’Does your father scrub the sidewalk with his beard?’”. In this scene, Misha keeps asking questions for Janina based on what he has seen around. Since Misha wanted to satisfy his curiosity and didn’t know that certain things had bounds, he kept spouting questions even if they were slightly offensive. Since there was no one around to teach him and answer some of his questions, he had to resort to asking others. The nurture side of the debate means that “This idea proposes that humans develop only from environmental influences.” It clearly means that humans can learn from the way they are brought up. Misha is someone who had to learn things at the moment without any guidance. Hence signally that Misha’s upbringing is a huge factor in his