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A Separate Peace by John Knowles
A Separate Peace was written by John Knowles in 1959 when he was 33. it is ser in a New Hampshire prep school during WWII. A few teens at this school are greatly affected by the war. Many adults are asking them to join the armed forces. Gene, the main character, trains with his once athletic star friend, Finny, for the Olympics. Although against the war many people request that he join. His other friend, Leper, joins and receives a Section 8 discharge for being considered "mentally unstable." Even though against the war, many of the boys do join the troops just to avoid being drafted to the front lines. This is also related to how many teens feel today. America is currently in a war which many people oppose but join the military for money or simply to travel. In times like these it is always good to reflect on the days of our ancestors and hear what it was like for them.
At Devon School the students feel obligated to join the forces because all of the adults who are instigating the war are constantly telling the boys the advantages of joining, knowing full well they themselves have no risk of getting hurt. Many of the boys buckle under the pressure and join, but others won't give in and decide to finish off their senior year of school. Unlike during WWII, teens do not feel the constant pressure to solve a war that their parents have started. Today's war is so controversial that saying that you oppose the war isn't as big a deal as it was during WWII.
At Devon its very hard to walk around on campus without talk of the war, as it is today, but today its very different. Today at school the kids will talk of both sides of the war, good and bad, not just the one side of it, as they did at Devon. Today we are more expressive of the war because not everyone agrees on the reason for the war. During WWII it was clear why they were at war and most of the nation agreed with it. Today we are a nation split in two, which is good because it allows people to speak their mind without criticism from the entire nation, but if you were to talk bad of the war during WWII, it was likely that you would be considered the most unpatriotic person in America.
The theme “rite of passage” was used in the novel A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. This moving from innocence to adulthood was contained within three sets of interconnected symbols: summer and winter, the Devon and Naguamsett Rivers, and peace and war. These symbols served as a backdrop upon which the novel was developed. The loss if Gene Forrester’s innocence was examined through these motifs.
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.
In John Knowles' novel A Separate Peace, the theme of loss of innocence is skillfully developed through setting, character, and symbols. This story simply details a young man's entering the adult world as all children do. Everyone suffers loss of innocence.
At the beginning of the literary criticism, it discusses how the book, A Separate Peace, began growing in popularity through the 1900’s. The book was first published by Secker and Wanderburg in London, England (Alton). Its sales drastically went up after it won the William Faulkner Foundation Award (Alton). After that, many teachers wanted A Separate peace to replace the classic, Catcher and the Rye, due to the profanity found in the latter (Alton). After that, the various authors in the literary criticism discuss the praises and criticisms they have of the plot and characters in A Separate Peace. The first praise comes from David Holborn. He discusses how the flashback technique used at the beginning of the novel helps draw the reader
Maturity in A Separate Peace and Quiet on the Western Front. The evolution from a child to adult is a long and complex process. There is another transitional step that goes in the middle of these two periods. In warlike terms, such as those used in the settings of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and John Knowles's A Separate Peace, that step could be classified as being a soldier.
An Analysis of Inner Conflict in A Separate Peace In 1942, a group of prep school boys take courses to allow them extra time to prepare for the armed forces. Gene, a conservative intellectual, befriends Finny, a free-spirited adventurer. The two form a club where they must dive from a high tree limb into the Devon River. He becomes anxious that his friend is taking time away from his studies.
Gene Forrester, the narrator of the story, visited his previous school where he studied 15 years ago during the World War II. He wandered around the Devon school in New Hampshire and noticed that everything there seems to be coated with varnish and is well preserved. As he walks through the places in the school, he remembered the memories from his childhood, and he was reminded of how fearful they were. Then there, he decided to visit the places which he most closely associates with fear. The first one is the marble staircase which shows little sign of wear over the years. And the second one is the river where a specific tree is located.
War is inescapable. During hard times, bad things often have a way of embedding themselves in the good. A Separate Peace is the story of disobedient schoolboys during the second World War, and the writing focuses on how they are directly and indirectly affected by it. In A Separate Peace, John Knowles portrays how the boys achieve a separate peace during the Winter Carnival, yet their actions and symbols are tinged with war-like imagery.
A strong sense of self, in the words of William Shakespeare, is “To know what we are, but not what we might be.” In the book, A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the main character, Gene, ¬¬struggled with having a strong sense of self. His lack of identity negatively affected his life. The major consequence of his absent sense of self was his burning envy and hatred toward his extremely athletically gifted friend Finny. Gene’s lack of identity and hatred toward Finny led him to shake a limb if a tree that Finny was climbing. Finny fell and broke his leg. He later died when the bone marrow escaped into his blood. Gene’s behavior caused Finny’s death but there is reason to believe that Finny would have died anyway. For example, Finny could have been killed in the army, Finny’s lack of caution caused him to break his leg again, and the branch would have broken since it was already weak causing Finny to fall and die.
A Separate Peace shares the lives of students at Devon that are forced into an unknown world of fear, problems, and uncertainty as they head off to World War II in training to fight and represent their country where they will find or lose themselves and make important decisions that will impact their future. The students at Devon are put into adulthood at an early age, having to fight and make their country proud, but they are left feeling pressure for a war they do not start. The students enter a world of unexpectedness and dread where they are forced into adulthood through war, and are exposed to self sacrifice, physical awareness, and patriotism.
Power, the perception of superiority over another human, is the source of many conflicts between people. Feeling inferior causes people to act beyond their normal personality. John Knowles strongly demonstrates this point in his work, A Separate Peace. In the relationship between Finny and Gene, Gene sets himself up to be inferior in the balance of power which motivates him to act irrationally to take power back from Finny.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
A persona is a mask shown to the outside world developed in relation to consciousness, to hide the darkest aspects of a psyche, known as a shadow, behind it. Shadows contrast personas by holding undesirable and unwanted memories and behaviors, but the dark side of an individual must be accepted for the individual to fully understand oneself. In the coming of age novel, A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, narrator Gene Forrester returns to New Hampshire to visit Devon School, where he studied fifteen years ago just as World War II had begun to unfold. The narrative shifts back fifteen years ago to Gene’s days at Devon School with his best friend, Phineas, also known as Finny, as he recalls memorable events from his past. Gene’s persona and shadow
The novel A Separate Peace focuses mainly around a 17 year old named Gene Forrester and his psychological development. The story is set in a boys boarding school in USA during World War II. There are four main boys in the novel and they all undergo major character changes through the story. One of them goes crazy, and the others experience severe attitude changes. Gene is caught right in the center of these changes. He is very close with all of the other three boys, and thus all of the changes affect him very much. Due to all the tension occurring in this novel because of the war and events going on at the school, there is a lot of denial of truth happening. Three of the four boys mentioned earlier deny the truth at sometime in the story. This denying of truth sometimes ends with the person who committed the fault in a bad condition at the end of the book, and sometimes in good condition. So it can be said that there were both positive and negative results for each of the denials of the truth, but these will be explained more in-depth in the following paragraphs.
The 1970’s in America weren’t a time of peace for youth. The Vietnam War was still in full effect until 1975 leaving teenagers approaching 18 with the constant fear of being drafted. Post-Vietnam War was no better for American youth. Heroism and respect for the troops fell greatly due to the disastrous failing of the Vietnam War. One man spoke of his childhood du...