Thematic Essay On Peace

Betrayal, one of the most horrible things you could do to anyone your family, a friend anyone. To me it’s one of my all time most hated things a person could do and it’s almost unforgivable. In this book A Separate Peace by John Knowles two boys Phineas and Gene who are best friends at a boarding school in New Hampshire experience some of the worst kinds of Betrayal you could think of. Gene commits a very bad betrayal when he jousts the tree limb they are both standing on ending up with Finny falling and badly breaking his leg. This was no accident because Gene can’t stand the guilt.

As Carl Jung once stated, “Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious”. To reach a peaceful reconciliation, one must learn to embrace two distinct elements of their personality, the "Persona" and "Shadow." Likewise, in the bildungsroman, A Separate Peace, author John Knowles depicts the common rivalry between young adolescents, and how they struggle to accept their identity and the relationship between their unconscious self. Gene, a Devon High student, becomes best friends with Finny and grows jealous of his ostensibly flawless friend, causing him to make a life-changing decision. His struggles to reach an inner balance between his “Persona” and “Shadow” lead to the ultimate death of Finny. Gene’s transformation involves the changes of his mask and “Shadow”—from guilt and jealousy to pride and tolerance—which results in the later acceptance of the light and dark parts of himself, allowing him to truly reach adulthood and a state of 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.

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.

John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace” takes place at a boarding school during World War II. Best friends Gene and Finny have been inseparable during their time at the Devon School. This is until reality hits Gene, and he slowly starts to realize that he is inferior to his best friend. Through the unbalanced friendship between two teenagers in “A Separate Peace,” Knowles illustrates that a loss of identity may be present in a relationship if there is an unequal amount of power.

There are many different themes that make up the novel a separate peace, but some that stand out are friendship, loyalty, and jealousy. some examples of those three themes are when finny broke the swimming record and told gene not to tell anyone, it shows loyalty because gene listened to finny and didn't tell anyone about him breaking the record and it also shows friendship, it hints to jealousy though because throughout the story gene thinks that finny is trying to look like he is better than him at sports and it shows that gene is jealous.

As humans were on Earth their emotions kept the people they liked close and the people they didn’t out. Furthermore getting a human's trust is hard to earn but one wrong move they could lose all trust someone had with them; with losing trust someone could be sent into chaos. This chaos could show the dark side of human nature. As shown in the movie, The Dead Poet's Society and also within the book, The Separate Peace the readers are given an incite to the dark side of human nature.

Peace is very complex. It could happen when your young, or when your older and more experienced. Peace can come from bright times or dark time, such as death. In the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles Gene finds peace in a very odd way. He has a quite “separate peace” from everyone else. Staring off as one piece, braking off into a separate piece, and finally finding a separate peace, Gene discovers he is himself, and not Finny.

"Your surroundings may change but your essence and your personality pretty much stay the same" (Dewan). The setting of the novel A Separate Peace is at an all boys school located in New Hampshire. The characters and plot are finely woven into the fabric of this institution. However, would events in this novel turn out differently if the story was set in a public high school, with a diverse environment? The characters and plot of A Separate Peace are not solely driven by their surroundings because the boys would still break the rules, Gene would have internal conflicts, and the war would affect the students.

World Connection Question: Would you risk your relationship with your best friend in order to further your own self interests? I would not risk my relationship with my best friend to further my own self interests because in a true friendship, I would care about my best friend’s interests no less than my own. Unlike in A Separate Peace, I would not purposefully hurt my relationship with my best friend in order to benefit myself. Gene says, “Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies”(Knowles 53).

The civil war ended and it was soon the beginning of many hardships. “The Problems of Peacemaking” discusses all of the problems with the Northerners and Southerners becoming peaceful after the war. President Abraham Lincoln did many things to try to get peace after the war. When he realized it wasn’t going to be easy, he decided that a “Reconstruction Plan” could maybe help them get peace. After the civil war the South didn’t have many things left because everything they had was destroyed almost completely. People living in the south wanted to regain it back but they soon realized it wasn’t that easy to do. The white southerners lost some land and their slaves but that was nothing compared to the black southerners. Black southerners lost everything when they left to get freedom, besides a little bit of clothing and a few possessions they took with them. Blacks and whites had completely different meanings of freedom. The whites wanted to control what they did without the government’s input, and the blacks wanted to get freedom from the whites. The whites wanted white supremacy which is, they wanted to be more superior. The blacks just wanted to be control and own things such as land. General William Sherman’s “Special Field Order No. 15” helped give 400,000 acres of land to 40,000 freed slaves. Other methods were produced to help slaves get land, one of the most famous was the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Freedmen’s Bureau gave slaves food, health care, clothing, and education. The whites of course, disagreed with the Bureau and would have disputes about it. The disputes were all settled by the Freedmen’s Bureau. General Howard created the “Circular 13” which helped lease 40 acre plots to slaves and hoped to later sell it to them. He also made the Southern Homestead Act that made 46 million acres for sell to slaves in many states. It was later repealed because people thought slaves were taking advantage of it. Republicans had say in what happened during the reconstruction. The conservatives and radicals disagreed on their views. The radicals were more harsh. All the conservatives said was that the south should just take what was happening and do nothing about it. The radicals wanted to take away some rights from a

“He pretended that if the secrets stayed inside him, with all the other secrets, he could fool the world and himself too”

From juvenility to maturity, A Separate Peace combines classic American Literature with a thoughtful plot-line that is developed to affect the readers’ mind and heart. The author, John Knowles of Fairmont, West Virginia, had one clear purpose for writing this book. This purpose was to show the disastrous mental and physical problems which arise as the result of war, specifically the repercussions they have on the home front. A good lesson to learn from this book is that even a war three-thousand miles away can have just as much ramification as a war three miles away. This novel shows the transition of Gene Forrester and his friends from boyhood to manhood during a

Overcoming internal barriers is a struggle humans typically endure. The novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles focuses on the friendship between two teenage boys, Gene and Phineas, who are the exact opposite of one another. It is told from Gene’s point of view as he journeys through adolescence while attending one of the most prestigious boarding schools in America during World War II, Devon. Gene learns that when times are difficult he can move past his struggles by latching onto an idea, hope, or an essence of peace. As he matures, it is clear that his friendship with Phineas has played a key role in helping Gene discover and accept who he is because he helped him to unveil the enemy that was inside the whole time

What has been noted by Historians and scholars has been the effect of WW1 on World Peace.