A Separate Peace Literary Analysis

The methods Finny use in order to cope with his fear distorts the way Gene perceives the conflicts surrounding him. A prime example of this is during a time where Finny is in denial of the war as well as Gene being guilty of hurting him. Gene recounts the impact Finny had on him and notices that:

Gene’s envy and imitation of Finny affect him in many ways. Gene begins to lose his identity and start conforming to Finny. According to Knowles, “If I was head of the class and won that prize then we would be even…” (27). This quote explains how Gene follows finny by trying to be head of the class with him. Gene gets jealous of Finny being head of the class, so he tells him if he was head they would be even. When Finny introduce jumping off the tree to Gene at first he didn’t want to do it, but he wanted to be like Finny so he did it. In Knowles words, “what was I doing up here anyway? Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like this? Was he getting some kind of hold over me? (5).

Gene’s envy and intimidation of Finny caused great internal turmoil with himself throughout the story. He went through and identity crisis because he was unsure of who he was and who he wanted to be. In the story, Gene said, “I went along, as I always did, with any new invention of Finny’s” (Knowles 117). He always went along with everything Finny proposed or did; this gave him little to no time to discover who he really was. This lack of personal discovery lead him to doubt who he was. This internal conflict within Gene also affected his personal actions. Before Finny’s fall, Gene said, “I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb” (Knowles

A Separate Peace questions morals in friendships and how friendships survive through tough times. In the book, Gene and Finny have many disagreements, but most of them are between a character and the idea of the other character. They keep trying to make the best out of their situations, yet sometimes their

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.

Life isn’t fair. This common phrase rings true for the characters in A Separate Peace, a novel from 1959. The story takes place in the time of World War Two. Gene and Finny are the best of friends, but the entire book revolves around an accident where Gene causes Finny, or Phineas, to fall off a tree and shatter his leg, changing his life forever. Finny denies anything he finds negative or harmful, including the war, his injury, and Gene’s part in the accident, choosing to remain young and ignorant of since he knows he’ll be happier that way. However, Finny does eventually recognizes the facts of his life. John Knowles uses characterization to shed light on the dangers of naivete through the character Finny. Innocence causes Phineas to become ignorant of what’s happening all around him, which makes it dangerous. This becomes a problem because nobody can run away from the truth forever, and whenever all the facts of war and the accident catch up with him they will hit hard.

The novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles is about learning and it reveals that people have to have the bad to see the good. This thematic statement connects to both the book and the world that we live in today. Many people want everything to be perfect and beautiful but the hard truth is that it will never completely be that way. Life isn’t going to be the way every stroke was placed on the perfect painting of life that everyone has in there head which was handcrafted from their wildest dreams. Their may be some slippery patches but good will follow close behind.

Gene made Finny his enemy, only because he felt envious of his personality and character. Knowles explains that all people should live life to its fullest, and avoid jealousy, envy, and hatred. A liberal humanistic review, shows that Knowles’ novel, promotes the enhancement of life.

When Gene is quick to realize that him and Finny will never be of the same power, Knowles shows us that a loss of identity may be present in a relationship if there is an unequal amount of power. Gene realizes that Finny is someone who can do anything and he states that “He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could be any rivalry between us. I was not the same quality as he” (59). Gene’s low self-esteem starts to build up as he explains that no matter how hard he tries, he will never be as good and powerful as Phineas. Finny has everything in his power and is capable of so many things also remaining his own person. However, Gene feels the complete opposite as he understands that to become someone as mighty as Finny, he has to change who he is to even get Finny to notice him as a threat. As a result of this unequal

“But I no longer needed this vivid false identity . . . I felt, a sense of my own real authority and worth, I had many new experiences and I was growing up “(156). Gene’s self-identity battle ends and he finds his real self. Gene’s developing maturity is also shown when he tells the truth about Leper. His growing resentment against having to mislead people helps Gene become a better person. When Brinker asks about Leper, Gene wants to lie and tell him he is fine but his resentment is stronger than him. Instead Gene comes out and tells the truth that Leper has gone crazy. By pushing Finny out of the tree, crippling him for life and watching him die; Gene kills a part of his own character, his essential purity. Throughout the whole novel Gene strives to be Finny, but by the end he forms a character of his own. Gene looks into his own heart and realizes the evil. “. . . it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart” (201). He grasps that the creation of personal problems creates wars. Gene comes to acknowledge Finny’s uniqueness and his idealism and greatly admires his view of the world. He allows Finny’s influence to change him and eliminates the self-ignorance. At Finny’s funeral Gene feels that he buries a part of himself, his innocence. “I could not escape a feeling

Chapter four starts with the gray dawn and closes with a gray dusk. Also, it begins with Gene describing Finny coming to life as Lazarus and ends with the tragic fall that destroys his life. Finny wakes that morning with characteristic action, proposing a quick swim. But of couse Gene declines because he is thinking about his limits and rules. When he looked at the sun, he knew it was about 6:30, and all he could do was worry about his trigonometry test that would be at 10:00. For Gene, the meaning of the morning emerges not from the beauty of the dawn the beautiful beach, but from his worries and disappointments. Finny has lost their money, and they must now bicycle back to Devon without breakfast and arrive just in time for Gene to fail his

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.

In A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, Leper’s dining room is portrayed as rigid and emotionless this conveys the lack of nurturing within his family which draws him to go to boarding school, and later enlist in the army. Gene visits Leper’s home in snowy Vermont where Leper has sought refuge after running away from training camp. Immediately after Gene arrives, Leper invites him into the dining room. John Knowles illustrates it as “ under-furnished dining room of high-backed chairs, rugless floor, and cold fireplace,” (Knowles 141). The dining room seems apathetic.

Gene wishes that he could be as athletic, charismatic, and easy-going as Finny. With Finny being good at so many things Gene believes that Finny is out to destroy the few things he excels at. In chapter three, the two guys go to the beach and Finny says, “..at this teen-age period in the life the proper person is your best pal...which is what you are.” The readers can later see that Gene thinks that this is Finny’s way of distracting him from aceing his trigonometry

Everyone matures somehow, even if it is only a small change. However, people mature differently. Some still act childish by the time they're in high school, and some already act like adults by then. The director John Hughes and the author John Knowles realized this, and adapted this idea into their work, both having a character that represents the carefree days of adulthood and another that represents the seriousness of adulthood. The movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the novel A Separate Peace both have characters that are best friends that can be considered allegories for childhood and adulthood.