Friendship In John Knowles A Separate Peace

Gene was jealous of Finny throughout the whole book because Finny was more athletically inclined then him, and Finny was able to do basically whatever he wanted to.¨ I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little¨(8). This lead Gene to want to be better than Finny, by being first in the class. One night while Gene was studying Finny interrupted him, as he wanted to go jump out of the tree. After a little argument Gene eventually went with Finny to the tree, but he was still kind of angry. This lead Finny to jounce the tree limb. ¨Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. 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 with a sickening, unnatural thud¨(28). Because of this fall, Finny completely shattered his leg. He may have been able to walk again, but he would never play sports again. Because of Gene's jealousy toward Finny he decided to make a rash move, which cost his friend their

In order to find the answer to that question, we must look at the bad things and the good things about their relationship. Let’s start with the good things. Gene and Finny complemented each other. Where Gene lacked in athletics, Phineas exceeded, and where Finny lacked in grades, Gene exceeded. After Finny’s tragic accident, which meant he could no longer play sports, he helped Gene become athletic to take his place. Since Finny was crippled, Gene helped him get better

“I don’t give any reason for anyone to hate me. They create their own little drama out of jealousy.”-David James. Gene is jealous of Phineas, because he is better at everything. In the book A Separate Peace there is a lot of evidence proving this quote.

As Gene and Phineas begin to establish a close friendship, Gene secretly develops a strong sense of jealousy towards Phineas, which leads to a life-changing incident. Fear of the unknown and those who are different is part of human nature. Gene and Phineas are complete opposites; one is a serious scholar, while the other is an athletically talented individual with a free, unbalanced spirit. When Gene notices that he is beginning to lose his identity to Phineas, he decides that he must get rid of that part of him by pushing Phineas out of a tree, leaving Phineas with a broken leg. Right before the incident, Gene and Phineas get into a small altercation, which causes Gene to realize Phineas’ innocence. Gene states that “[Phineas] had never been jealous of me for a second [...] there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the

After the realization of the person he truly is Gene confronts with his problems, faces reality, and deals with the future. He learns a lot about life and relationships when he finds about his true self. He learns that he must truly express his feelings and communicate instead of keeping all the feelings inside as he had always done with Phineas. Also he learns to listen to himself not others around him if he wants a true advice. After a while, he faced reality and acknowledged the fact that he was not as great was Phineas but they were two different individuals and they were unique in different ways. Gene accepted the guilt for Phineas’ difficulties after his accident and decided he must he must help him as a punishment and act of repentance for what his deed. He does this by giving part of himself to Phineas as we see with the case of the sports

He’s always trying to find a way to impress them to make him feel better about himself. For example, he tries to romanticize his background by hanging up pictures of plantations in his room. “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb” (60). In this quote, Gene let his jealousy control him and he jounced the limb Finny was on. It seems like it was more of an impulse and that he never actually meant to hurt Phineas. By the end of the book, Gene has become very loyal to Phineas because he learned that he shouldn’t take things for granted. “I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way” (197). He feels differently about Phineas after he died and he has dealt with his jealousy. Gene used to view anything as a competition with his friends, but he realizes that it was never a

First of all, Gene Forrester is the narrator and one of the main characters in the novel. One of Gene’s best friends is Phineas, another main character in the novel, and an important one as well. Gene and Phineas’s relationship has its ups and downs. One of the downs being, Gene's feeling of jealousy towards Phineas. Phineas is an athletic champion and a charmer, someone everyone adores. These same qualities of Phineas make academic and studious Gene envious. The envy drives Gene to try to be a better student than Phineas, thinking that would make them equal. He thought that if he could be the smartest person in the class, then it would be equal to Phineas’s athletic stardom. What he did not know was it would change him as a person and his

World War II took many lives away from people, physically and mentally. The struggle inside of Phineas’ mind about if he meant to hurt Gene on purpose is a type of war. He tries to reassure himself that it was only an accident, but he can’t help but think that he could have done it out of envy of Gene’s talents. Some soldiers came back home mentally disturbed and not the same as they were before the war. Gene visited a friend from school that had just gotten back from the war and he was an extremely different

Gene contemplates his and Finny’s friendship many times in the book, but despite what Gene may have thought, Finny was a good friend to him. He always took Gene’s feelings into account, and through all that happened he had faith in Gene. But Gene never knew this,

At the start, Gene is instantly jealousy of Finny, creating a fake friendship that is fueled by competition. This is shown when he wants to do something so he is good at, so he “was becoming the best student in the school: Phineas was without question the best athlete, so in that way we were even” (Knowles 55). This proves that their friendship is fueled by competition because it shows that Gene always wants to be even. This

However , Gene emulates Phineas by joining him for tree climbing and jumping into the river. Forester notes, “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?”(Knowles 5). Knowles emphasizes the crisis on Genes mind which leads to him becoming more envious and

A second way is when he begins to try and somewhat become Phineas. Like shown here, “… a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.” (Knowles 85) from the quote, Gene is stating how by doing sports for Finny gives him a sense of purpose. Also that it may help support his thought of “losing a part of himself”. This only though shows the few of many examples throughout the book of how genes envy or imitation of Finny can affect him in a way.

come easily to him. He is not capable of such emotions as jealousy or envy. He

Hearing Phineas fall after the trial led Gene to become hysteric. He abandons all rational thought, and ends up laughing in a deranged manner under Finny’s window while imagining people talking. All of the different emotions finally become too much, and Gene cannot handle it anymore.

Normally when you think of friends, you do not associate them with fear. It seems like Knowles associated fear with Gene's friends. After purposely jostling the tree branch to injure Phineas, Gene did not want to immediately tell Phineas what had actually happened. Gene said that his fear of jumping off the tree branch was forgotten after this event. Phineas did not know if he had fallen on his own or if he had been pushed by Gene. Gene was understandably worried about Finny's reaction to this conversation, so he put the conversation off for as long as he could. He also did not completely trust Phineas. Even though they were supposedly friends, Gene thought that Finny was secretly one of his rivals. Gene said, "The way I believed that you're-my-best-friend blabber" (Knowles 53). Finally, Gene showed that he was fearful of his friends toward the ending of A Separate Peace. When Brinker decided that there must be a trial to determine what had happened to Phineas, Gene fretted about what his fellow students might discover about him. Brinker said, "What I mean is it wouldn't do you any harm, you know, if everything about Finny's accident was cleared up and forgotten" (Knowles 160). He did not want them to find out about his role in Finny's injury. After Phineas injured his leg rushing down the steps of the Assembly Hall, Gene seemed to have a sense of fear until Finny died. Phineas never seemed to fear Gene, even after he had found out about Gene's role in his injury.