Gene Finny: The Struggle For Inner Peace

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When Gene was a student at Devon he seemed to be a serious yet childish teenager that saw everyone as a rival, including his best friend Finny. The three main events in the novel that were significant stages of development of Gene that transform him from an unconfident, fearful, angry teenager to an adult who has managed to successfully deal with these negative feelings and to live a life of inner peace and harmony were accidentally breaking Finny’s leg, in Brinker's informal Butt Room trial which later went into the more formal Assembly Room to investigate more into Finny's accident, and essentially being the reason why Finny died. These experiences Gene had, caused him have this nagging guilt for a long time that he returns to the school …show more content…

Ever since Gene made the jump of the tree for the first time, Finny breaks his “boundaries” of just his basic, casual routine of following the rules and studying. Startled and undermined by Finny's flexibility, Gene responds like a child —gloomy, pulled back, indirect in communicating protest. Rather than joining Finny wholeheartedly or genuinely talking through his sentiments, Gene smothers his blended feelings and transforms the new experience of flexibility into another sort of similarity: He concludes that he should take after Finny's impulses no matter what or chance losing his companionship. This "win big or bust" considering, puerile in its effortlessness, drives Gene to disdain Finny and at last causes the rough flare-up that pulverizes an …show more content…

Gene deeply admired Finny but he also envied him. But once he realizes that Finny is neither his opponent nor his enemy, makes him feel meaningless. Such as how a child comprehends that not everything is about them. The thought of this makes Gene furious. To “take out his anger” he ends up subconsciously jouncing the limb, causing Finny to fall off. “It struck me then that I was injuring him again. It occurred to me that this could be an even deeper injury than what I had done before. I would have to back out of it, I would have to disown it.”(Knowles 70) This quote can be interpreted in two different ways. Either this demonstrates Gene's greatest moments of honesty; because he would rather live with his shame than hurt Finny by revealing the truth. Or it's yet just another moment of justification; he pretends he doesn't want to hurt Finny in order to deny the truth and save himself from

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