A Separate Peace Book Analysis

In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Gene, Finny, and Leper fear recognizing their own flaws and learning about the harsh realities of a world at war because it affects their decision making causing them to make poor decisions, such as severely hurting one another, more frequently.

Fear surrounds Gene during his time at the Devon school, affecting how he feels towards others as well as how well he trusts others. The fear isolates Gene from his friends and makes him, both, become weary of the evils around him as well as make him see other irrelevant evils.

“Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence,” (Chapter 1). Gene, after returning to the devon school, finds the atmosphere unchanged and still riddled with fear. He is reminded of the fear he felt during his days at the school because, while he attended Devon, World War II was taking place and 17 year-old Gene who was a year away from being drafted feared going off to war.

“I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky,” (Chapter 1). Surrounded by fear, Gene is trying to find some sort of source of joy. He needs this joy to uplift him because, without it, the terrors surrounding him, such as the war, emotional struggles, and personal rivalries, could drive him insane.

“Any fear I had ever had of the tree was nothing beside this. It wasn't my neck, bu...

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...imum standard of the army. I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it; I wondered in the silences between jokes about Leper whether the still hidden parts of myself might contain the Sad Sack, the outcast, or the coward. We were all at our funniest about Leper, and we all secretly hoped that Leper, that incompetent, was as heroic as we said,” (Chapter 9). Leper goes mad and “abandons ship” does not bode well for the boys.

"That was when things began to change. One day I couldn't make out what was happening to the corporal's face. It kept changing into faces I knew from somewhere else, and then I began to think he looked like me," (Chapter 10). Leper's visions portray a fear of changing identity. He is afraid of letting the war change him into a different person, which greatens his fear of joining the war effort.