A Separate Peace By John Knowles

Gene gains peace from guilt when he becomes self-aware, mature, and remorseful. The subsequent time that Finny injures his leg, Gene goes to see him and expresses sincere regret, showing his remorse. When visiting Finny, Gene confesses that what happened up on that tree was a rage of jealousy that had controlled him. Confessing to Finny helps Gene overcome the burden of guilt. Finny’s death causes Gene to become sad, however he was relieved that they were able fixed their friendship before it was too late. At Finny’s funeral Gene “did not cry” and “could not escape a feeling that this was [his] funeral”, showing that he lost a piece of him (Knowles 194). Gene feeling that

The boys at the Devon school, in the novel A Separate Peace, written by John Knowles, are World War II influenced by making them mature and grow up more quickly than they would have had there not been a war. The war makes some boys stronger and more ready for whatever life would bring, while in others it disables them to the point that they cannot handle the demands of life. This novel shows a “coming-of age” story, especially with three boys. Gene starts out as a naïve and sensitive person but matures into a person more knowledgeable and capable of handling the challenges of life through his crisis experiences with of course, Phineas, Leper and, Brinker.

The novel A Separate Peace focuses mainly around a 17 year old named Gene Forrester and his psychological development. The story is set in a boys boarding school in USA during World War II. There are four main boys in the novel and they all undergo major character changes through the story. One of them goes crazy, and the others experience severe attitude changes. Gene is caught right in the center of these changes. He is very close with all of the other three boys, and thus all of the changes affect him very much. Due to all the tension occurring in this novel because of the war and events going on at the school, there is a lot of denial of truth happening. Three of the four boys mentioned earlier deny the truth at sometime in the story.

Gene Forrester is the protagonist in A Separate Peace. He is also the narrator of the story speaking in first person, telling what happened at Devon in 1942 from his own unique point of view. As a sixteen years old, he goes through self-consciousness, uncertainty, jealousy, and an identity crisis. However, at times, he is thoughtful, competitive and has a tendency to brood. As the story goes on, Gene develops a love-hate relationship with his best friend, Finny, whom he alternately adores and envies.

A Separate Peace is a World War II setting book written by the author, John Knowles. A Separate Peace is an example of a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age  novel. One of the main characters, Gene Forrester, is a perfect example of someone who is coming-of-age. As the  novel progresses, Gene  is transformed and impacted by many different experiences during his time at Devon High School.  In the book, A Separate Peace, Gene  becomes mature from his experiences from Finny’s death and Training for the Olympics; He also loses his innocence, and this teaches the reader about growing up and the idea of losing innocence.

Being “envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide”. John Knowles wrote A Separate Peace, based on the German term bildungsroman. Gene is smart, intelligent, and a really great person to be around. He has a great personality up until, he starts to emulate Finny. A Separate Peace demonstrates how Gene’s envy and imitation of Finny affect him, their friendship, and Gene ends up finding peace.

War is a destructive force whose nature is to destroy all things and change lives forever. It is a whirlpool that sucks everything in and is fueled by hatred and violence. Whether one is directly involved in the battlefield or waiting to see the outcome, war has the capacity to affect all people. It can harden one beyond their years and force them to grow, seeing conflicting sides of good and evil. A Separate Peace by John Knowles narrates the story of young boys growing up with World War II as the backdrop. The war impacts them dramatically and is constantly thought about as they are coming of the age since they will soon be enlisted. However, not only are they living during an era of war but are also struggling with the war inside of themselves as they search for the truth within. Knowles depicts the ability of war to affect teenage boys in Devon, an English preparatory school, and transform them from carefree boys to troubled young men in search of their own separate peace.

John Knowles’ novel A Separate Peace is about a few boys at a boarding school in New Hampshire. The story is centered around the friendship of two boys, Gene and Finny, at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Although in the beginning of their friendship Gene did not trust Finny, by the time he dies Gene feels as if a part of him has died, showing that he still felt closely bonded to him after all they had been through.

Throughout John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Gene’s internal struggle is reflected in the war taking place. In the beginning of the story, Finny tells Gene that he was reading the paper and saw that “[the United States] bombed Central Europe...”(25). At this point in the story, it is 1942, which is the midst of World War II. This reflects Gene’s attitude toward Finny. As the war starts to escalate and the United States enters, Gene starts to loathe Finny for reasons that are entirely from Gene’s head. When Finny returns to Devon for the winter session, he has convinced himself, and soon convinces Gene, that “there isn’t any war”(115). Around this time, Gene pushes away his hateful thoughts towards Finny and convinces himself that Finny and him

John Knowles’ novel, A Separate Peace, reveals the many dangers and hardships of adolescence. The main characters, Gene, and Finny, spend their summer together at a boarding school called Devon. The two boys, do everything together, until Gene, the main character, develops a resentful hatred toward his friend Finny. Gene becomes extremely jealous and envious of Finny, which fuels this resentment, and eventually turns deadly. Knowles presents a look at the darker side of adolescence, showing jealousy’s disastrous effects. Gene’s envious thoughts and jealous nature, create an internal enemy, that he must fight. A liberal humanistic critique reveals that Knowles’ novel, A Separate Peace, has a self contained meaning, expresses the

In his novel A Separate Peace, John Knowles demonstrates that, to achieve adulthood, one must lose innocence and acknowledge this loss.

Crafted by author John Knowles in the late 1950’s, A Separate Peace is a heart-wrenching Bildungsroman narrated by a pensive Gene Forrester as he reflects upon trials and tribulations at his alma-mater, the Devon Boarding School. In an attempt to process the tragic loss of his best friend and coping with his own responsibility in his friend’s death, Gene returns to the campus to confront his progressive loss of Finny in both his plummet from the tree by the river to his tumble down the marble staircase. At a glance, Finny and Gene’s relationship appears to be a story of tragedy as Gene must forever carry the loss of his very best friend, but as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Gene and Finny’s relationship before Finny’s accident was far from being black-and-white. Diving deeper into the text, Gene reveals his true feelings about Finny that fluctuate from Finny being an object of obsession to being a source of resentment. As the story is told from Gene’s point of view, the reader is submerged into the realm of Gene’s odd fascinations with Finny and the manifestations of his feelings of hatred and idolization as he acts out in odd ways, such as mimicking Finny’s facial expressions and clothing and developing conspiracy theories in which Finny is planning Gene’s academic downfall. Gradually, the picture painted of the teenage Gene Forrester of A Separate Peace becomes more and more distorted as Gene’s sanity is called into question. His

This change is shown in “A Separate Peace” when the residing feelings of happiness fade to confusion and tragedy. As the summer session comes to an end, Finny falls from a tree and shatters his leg. Gene witnesses this and affirms “Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank…” (Knowles 52). This abnormal mistake in Finny’s behavior was caused by Gene’s recently developed feelings of resentment towards his friend. Gene thinks “Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies” (Knowles 45). Gene purposely jounced the limb Finny was standing on due to his rash feelings of animosity. These feelings are conveniently aligned with the season shift by the author to add character development and change, as well as symbolism and depth in his writing. Gene’s shift from a trusting, willing friend to a skeptical, apprehensive enemy shows how the season of fall changes the characters in this novel. In final analysis, autumn brings about a negative change in the boy's psyche and forces them to face unpleasant realities and come to terms with their friendship.

A Separate Peace, which was written by John Knowles, has many themes. They are interconnected throughout the book. The most clearly portrayed theme is fear. It seems to be connected with the themes of friendship, jealousy, and war. As World War II was occurring, fear had taken over Gene's life through these various themes. When he visited Devon fifteen years after leaving the school, Gene claimed, "I had lived in fear while attending the school and I can now feel fear's echo" (Knowles 10). He felt like he had gained a separate peace after escaping from this fear.

Throughout life, there is always a person who one strives to beat, be better than or rise above. Little does each of them know that in the end the two actually make each other stronger. In John Knowles' novel, A Separate Peace (1959), he addresses just this. The novel, told from Gene Forrester's point of view, is based on a friendship and rivalry between him and his friend, Finny, during World War II. The two sixteen year olds attend Devon School, a private all boys' school, in New Hampshire. Finny, a very athletically talented youngster, continually but unintentionally causes Gene to feel inferior and insignificant, producing inevitable anger and jealousy inside Gene. During their