In the boys’ own world, their lives are checkered with war-like references, the boys act like war officials and even at the most peaceful of times, war breaks out. In A Separate Peace, John Knowles depicts how to boys’ achieve a separate peace through the Winter Carnival, yet their actions and objects are tinged with war-like imagery. During the Winter Carnival, the boys’ actions become inherently war-like. The first boy to reveal his true colors tinged with the stain of war is Brinker. Brinker commands his roommate “Brownie Perkins, to guard [the cider] with his life.” Brinker is a commanding person, and here he is taking on a position well suited for him, general. Knowles adds this behavior to show that these boys are being bred to become war heroes, which greatly impacts their behavior and lives. Chet is the next boy to succumb to war-like behavior. Chet plays the …show more content…
Knowles includes Chet in the Winter Carnival to be the announcer, to call out the start of the fight between the boys, the start of their own personal war. Knowles also adds war references, which he compares the boys’ collective actions to. After the fight between the boys, the silence is described as “like a bomb [hanging] between us.” This comparison describes the boys waiting; waiting to see if the other would strike or surrender. Knowles adds this to increase war imagery being used during the Winter Carnival; it is a direct image correlating to the boys’ actions. Knowles then furthers his description of Brinker’s war-like actions. Brinker “formally declare[s] …that these Games are open.” Here, Brinker is defying Finny, the apparent person in charge, and he is interpreting things the way he wants to, listening to no one. Knowles may have added these details
Friendship is a necessity throughout life whether it is during elementary school or during adulthood. Some friendships may last a while and some may last for a year; it depends on the strength of the bond and trust between the two people. In the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles, the main characters, Gene and Finny, did not have a pure friendship because it was driven by envy and jealousy, they did not feel the same way towards each other and they did not accurately understand each other.
...and wounds soldiers but murdering their spirits. War hurts families and ruins lives. Both stories showed how boys became in terrible situations dealing with war.
However, with war imagination, boys are creating their boundaries rather than moving on. For example, in “Rites of Passage”, the speaker noticed that the son and his friends had become “like Generals, they relax and get down to/playing war” (Olds 24-25). This explains that even though they are young, they act mature without overcoming their wrestling game which prevents them from growing up. Similarly, boys believe they are capable of becoming generals. For example, in “Boys” while they played dangerous war game, the speaker and his friends imagined themselves, “We were the generals – we ran the war” (Tilley 5). This demonstrates that their imagination enthusiasm them to become General along with their war game. Because of that, they are unable to stop their game and move on to develop their mature men. This poem emphasizes that as long as they develop their war imagination and interest of war, boys will not be able to grow up. They will have to advance their ego from their juvenile to realize that their war imagination is impossible to become a mature
As part of an assignment from the clique of school bullies, Jerry is supposed to refuse to sell chocolates for the school for a few days. However, when those few days end, Jerry realizes he does not want to blindly do what others' tell him and continues to refuse to sell the chocolates. This causes a backlash from both the school bullies and the man in charge of the school. The bullies start to orchestrate violent attacks against Jerry to try and get him to submit to selling the chocolates. The man in charge of the school keeps blackmailing the group of school bullies into tormenting Jerry (although the bullies are not really that opposed to tormenting the poor kid who they had given this mission to in the first place). Despite these attacks and threats against him, Jerry stands his ground and does not budge in his conviction to not participate in the school chocolate sale. However, it is difficult for one student to fight off not only a group of bullies but the man in charge of the school. In The Chocolate War, Cormier demonstrates the reality that plenty of students face on a day-to-day basis. The story shows how administrators can easily let their power for to their heads and how bullies can attack and threaten their way into power. In this novel, Cormier does not give an easy out or an inspirational underdog story. The Chocolate War is far from the typical high-school-is-the-best-time-of-our-lives fluff
The book starts out by talking about how they all went to school together. He introduces all of the characters and describes what they all are like. The characters in this book learn to deal with the cold nights and their growling stomachs. Some of the soldiers would sneak out and get hay to cover up with during the night. (Page 40)
War slowly begins to strip away the ideals these boy-men once cherished. Their respect for authority is torn away by their disillusionment with their schoolteacher, Kantorek who pushed them to join. This is followed by their brief encounter with Corporal Himmelstoss at boot camp. The contemptible tactics that their superior officer Himmelstoss perpetrates in the name of discipline finally shatters their respect for authority. As the boys, fresh from boot camp, march toward the front for the first time, each one looks over his shoulder at the departing transport truck. They realize that they have now cast aside their lives as schoolboys and they feel the numbing reality of their uncertain futures.
The quote, “Ignorance is bliss,” by Thomas Gray is a seemingly adequate description of the lives of Gene, Finny, and Leper until they are all roughly jolted out of their fantasy world and brought back to reality. In A Separate Peace, John Knowles does an acceptable job of showing how disillusionment can greatly impact and, thus, change the lives of people. The book showcases the cycle of disillusionment and the ramifications it implies. Throughout the book, we see Gene, Leper, and Finny’s views on the world change. This all culminates in Gene being elevated to a higher level of understanding of the world and seeing the truth about Devon and the war. The illusions created by Finny and Leper are also taken on by Gene, and he, in turn, shares in their disillusionment. Overall, disillusionment is a part of life and often serves as a tool to help many people grow and learn from the past.
...s, demonstrated through the author's talent, are denouncing the authority figures who were supposed to guide his generation into adulthood but instead turned the youth against each other in the pursuit of superficial ideals. The soldiers were simply the victims of a meaningless war.
The boys live a new life without adults and social norms. Roles in their makeshift society have been carried out but Jack’s self-imposed responsibility only aims to fulfill his personal agenda. Jack’s fervent character is aggressiveness masquerading as passion. This destructive behavior sends Jack to a faster decline to savagery in relation to his peers.
Along with their friends, Gene and Finny play games and joke about the war instead of taking it seriously and preparing for it. Finny organizes the Winter Carnival, invents the game of Blitz Ball, and encourages his friends to have a snowball fight. When Gene looks back on that day of the Winter Carnival, he says, "---it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace" (Knowles, 832). As he watches the snowball fight, Gene thinks to himself, "There they all were now, the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with their high IQs and expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs"(843). Another of the principal themes in this novel is the theme of maturity.
Chris and Finny have the same drive to try something that they had never done before and breakaway, much like other young adults and that is “why [it] has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war” (Krakauer 182). Finny, an adventurous, daring boy at Devon wants to be a participant in the World War, like the other boys his age, but is not able to due to his leg injury. In most countries, the average age of people in the army is 18-20, usually young adults. It has always been easy to have people involved in the wars because many young adults want to prove that they are old enough to be independent and free from their parents and society’s expectations. Finny wrote to the army and the navy to try to be a part of the war, because he will “hate it everywhere if [he is] not in this war” as a result of the daring and confident side that he and many other boys of that time had (Knowles 103). Finny and Chris McCandless wanted to leave the simple life that they were leading and live a life of adventure. Many adventurers would agree that living a life full of unknown and adventure is the most exciting life that anybody could live, and that is what Chris and Finny wanted to achieve. Finny and Chris want to escape the horrid life that they lead and
"Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it" ( Knowles 5). In this novel A Separate Peace, using these words, John Knowles reveals the fear that haunts the students at Devon and when they proceeded with all their training for the war they mature into adults.
And finally war can divide and destroy communities. For example, when the Continental soldiers come to the tavern to get the Brown Bess from father because they think he is a tory (they think this because Redding was known to be a tory town and they didn’t want tories to have guns). This scene shows that people are forced to pick and choose sides and turn against other community members in times of
In the short story “Chickamauga”, the author Ambrose Bierce uses a young boy to connect to his audience with what is the disillusions of war, then leads them into the actuality and brutalities of war. Bierce uses a six year old boy as his instrument to relate to his readers the spirits of men going into combat, then transferring them into the actual terrors of war.
When the war breaks out, this tranquil little town seems like the last place on earth that could produce a team of vicious, violent soldiers. Soon we see Jim thrown into a completely contrasting `world', full of violence and fighting, and the strong dissimilarity between his hometown and this new war-stricken country is emphasised. The fact that the original setting is so diversely opposite to that if the war setting, the harsh reality of the horror of war is demonstrated.