Gene's Collaboration With Gene

With each scenario, it is shown that most of the time Gene’s enemies are only in his head- not many are in a battle to reign supreme as he is. The war put together with these power struggles allows for such a well done piece, for the reader learns that even in times where others are in battle one does not have to be anchored against someone. Phineas and Gene’s relationship is also instrumental in delivering this message because the reader can witness Phineas, with his free and peaceful ways and realize that Gene does not have to be on the defense and seek power all of the time. Phineas is a unique contrast to Gene that helps Knowles prove his point. Just as in the book, life shows us that this urge to beat an “enemy” is unnecessary and can often have consequences like the ones Gene experienced. It is crucial to recognize the reigning powers in life and not let them take over and cause one to find evil in everyone- Knowles displays this perfectly with Gene and his

Competition and rivalry have the ability to make people shine and accomplish things they never thought possible, and the ability to bring a person’s dark side and get them to do terrible things. Phineas and Gene’s friendship is viewed very differently by each of them. Where Phineas sees Gene as his best friend Gene sees Phineas as a competitor. Gene sees him as someone trying to keep him from being successful in school. This warped view of their relationship is the cause of many of the eventual problems of the novel and arguably the death of Phineas.

“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.

In this passage, Gene speaks as his older self and reflects on the meaning of his

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

Gene’s identity was resolved in the end. At the conclusion of the book, Gene’s older, more mature and Phineas is no longer in his life. He silences most of his pessimistic thoughts and he’s able to find himself, even though his past still looms in the back of his mind. It’s easy to get lost in who you are when life is throwing everything at you, but when it come to identity, the strain only gets

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

He is never satisfied with himself. Gene hangs pictures on his wall “...of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads winding dustily past the cabins of the Negroes” (156) to give the impression that he is a southern aristocrat which was “...a barefaced lie about [his] background…” (156). He also very jealous of Finny and feels that he wants to be like him. This is evident when he decides to put of Finny’s cordovan shoes, pants, and pink shirt. When Gene looked in the mirror, he felt like he became Finny. It made him feel good about himself because he was finally the person he was yearning to be but in the morning he was faced with the reality that he caused Finny to fall out of the tree. Gene usually feels like an ant, a humble nothing, but when he “transformed” into Phineas he feels less like an ant. He feels as superior as he sees Finny. He rose above his ant-like feelings in this moment. Gene is the cause of his low self-esteem because he feels the need to compare himself to Phineas. When Gene realizes that he is a very different person from Phineas it makes him feel lower. Phineas is a 16 year old athlete with

For many people, they struggle with finding their identity throughout Middle School and High School. The people that you hang out with, the teachers who teach you, and even the classes you take all shape and define who you are in school. At Devon, a military prep school, the students identity could be found in the war effort, friends, or even clubs. For Gene, he tried to define himself as someone who was popular, athletic, and a leader in the "Suicide Club". This starts an envious relationship with Finny who is already popular, athletic, and leader in the club. As the book goes on we started to see a change in Gene, a change to start to be more like Finny, even at one point "put on his clothes... but when I looked in the mirror it was no remote aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to the life." (A Separate Peace 29) Gene became so engulfed in trying to be like Finny that, in his own eyes, he had become Finny. In the end all we can fall back on is our faith in Jesus and find our identity in him. 2 Corinthians 5:7 says, “For we live by faith, not by

Gene was attempting to be top of his class academically, but he was continuously being distracted by Finny. Oneday Gene decided to ask Finny if he would be upset if Gene was top of their class. Finny responded by saying, “‘I’d kill myself out of jealous envy’” (Knowles 52). Although Phineas said that in a joking manner, it is clearly that he really would be jealous if Gene was top of their class. Finny loved to be first, and he didn’t like when people threatened his position. After pondering on Finny’s comment, Gene realized, that he may have, “deliberately set out to wreck [his] studies” (Knowles 53). Finny clearly had extreme envy of Gene for better academically. It is unhealthy for friends to be jealous of each other, especially when taken to that extreme. Finny was being unsupportive and selfish, just so that he could be better than Gene.

Towards the end of the book, Gene concludes to himself and says, “During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts

Identity is something that makes everybody exceptionally remarkable. If character did not exist in everyone, the world will appear to be exceptionally tedious. Other individuals can influence a man's character by the general population who we give out with. Throughout the story, Gene is a true dynamic character in the novel because he changes during the course of the story. The kinship Gene and Finny have all throughout the story gradually changes to jealousy that he shows towards Finny as a consequence of his envy. However, as the story progresses, he is also slowly changes from being insecure to being open about his feelings. Gene Forrester, the primary character in John

I think the conflict is that Gene want to get back at Phineas because he had got interrupted while studying. I also think that Gene thinks Phineas is interrupting him on purpose because they’re always having meetings for The Super Suicide Society when he tries to study. I don’t know exactly what the book said so I am just going to tell what I remember. I remember Gene saying that he couldn’t make it to the meeting to see if someone jumps off the tree into the river , and Phineas respond wasn't what he expected. When Gene stopped studying to go outside with Phineas , they were both on the tree branch getting ready to jump when Phineas lost his balance and fell onto the ground. Gene didn’t budge to help Phineas from falling.