Identity In A Separate Peace, By John Knowles

936 Words2 Pages

In John Knowles novel, A Separate Peace, the theme of identity is common and is often struggled with by the characters in the novel. The characters have a hard time with it because most times they don't know who they are, they don't feel comfortable in their own skin and they try to mold themselves into someone else.
At Devon School, the kids enrolled there all prepare themselves for what they see as the inevitable; enlisting in the war. When they reach senior year, the boys start to train for and focus on the war; because everyone seems to get caught up in enlisting for the war and being ready for it, pretty soon boys are just enlisting because the majority is doing it and they think they should to. “The class above, seniors, draft-bait, practically …show more content…

Their encounter goes less then smoothly and ends up upsetting both boys in the process, because Gene is so frightened by this psychotic Leper he separates this version of Leper from the Leper he knew before the war. “His eyes were furious now too, glaring blindly at me. "What do you know about it, anyway?" None of this could have been said by the Leper of the beaver dam” (10:143) Since Gene has a predetermined idea of how he thinks Leper is, the confrontation from Leper after the war throws Gene off and makes him uneasy; and the thing he thinks to do yet again to sooth his uneasy feelings is create a new identity; but this time for …show more content…

He is feeling sad and empty without Finny but also feels like it was he himself who died, “I did not cry then or ever about Finny. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's strait-laced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.” (12:194) He states that you don't cry at your own funeral, meaning he felt as if he had died alongside Finny. This shows us how much of his identity has been changed, he feels as though he is no longer Gene and that he is Finny, but now that Finny is dead so is the part of him that was

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