Esteban Durazo
Ms. Seidner
Block 7
16 September 2015
The Underlying Truth of Gene Have you ever felt as though a fellow comrade of yours was so envious of your achievements and natural abilities that he is considering to seriously maim you to a point where you can no longer excel where you once did before? In the book A Separate Peace John Knowles has created a fictional instance where non-fictional actions take place with two friends, and the figurative "balance" between the friends' actions and feelings toward each other are unbalanced. In the book Gene's actions and feelings toward people dictate that he does not contain the qualities of a good friend because he is envious, passive aggressive, and does not care about the well being of his best friend. To exemplify a reason how Gene is envious towards Phineas is that he flat out said it in the book. "I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best
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When Gene had shown up for his rowing session with Quacker, he was a bit late, and while Quacker was explaining to Gene why he isn't apart of the rowing team, Gene sprouted up and said this to him. "Listen here you maimed son of a bitch!" Gene then threw him into lake, it is noteworthy that Gene was very collected before this happening, it was a total shock to the reader. Another time Gene had displayed passive aggressiveness is when he went to go see Leper because he deserted the army for mental reasoning. When confronted with the statement of intentionally hospitalizing Finny, Gene then gets very aggressive throwing him to the ground even after receiving the knowledge that Leper contains mental problems. Which is not what a normal person would usually
...attacks, and burning from flame throwers. The Germans are relentlessly hostile toward the British and Canadian soldiers, saving no lives but disposing of many. The Germans are truly enemies of these soldiers; however, in this case they definitely do not act as friends, which ultimately disagrees with Timothy Findley’s assumption that one’s enemy is their closest friends. The saying, “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”, is truly substantiated within the text The Wars. For one’s “enemy” will not hurt them, as no trust is deposited into an enemy, however one’s friend will, since as a friend, one invests plenty of trust into another and by having this trust broken one is hurt more than anything. Timothy Findley deconstructs the concept of friend and enemy within his novel The Wars, by illustrating that one’s enemy will turn out to be their closest friend.
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.
John Knowles wrote a fantastic novel entitled A Separate Peace. Some important character in the novel were Gene, Finny, Leper, and Brinker. Gene and Finny were best friends; Leper was the outcast; Brinker was the “hub of the class” This was a novel about friendship, betrayal, war, peace, and jealousy. Although Gene and Finny were similar in many ways, they also had numerous differences.
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
I identified the first major player in the novel as Phineas. The quote I feel began his role reads: “No one but Phineas could think up such a crazy idea. He of course saw nothing the slightest bit intimidating about it. He wouldn’t, or wouldn’t admit it if he did. Not Phineas.” (14) This quote sets the reader up by describing the sort of person Finny : a daredevil with wild ideas and an air of fearlessness about him.
The American Library Association defines a challenge to a book as, “an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based on the objections of a person or group” (“About Banned). A Separate Peace by John Knowles was one of the many challenged books of its time; it was ranked sixty-seventh on the American Literature Association’s list of most challenged classic novels The book continues to be challenged all over the country and in 2013 it is ranked thirty-fifth on the summer of banned books list .(ALA). A Separate Peace chronicles the life of a boy named Gene Forrester, a student of the prestigious Devon School in New Hampshire. In Gene’s first year at Devon. He becomes close friends with his daredevil of a roommate Finny. Secretly Gene somewhat
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion. It is harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) A Separate Peace (1959) written by John Knowles, expresses the true struggle to respect ones individuality. In 1942 at a private school in New Hampshire Gene Forrester became good friends with his roommate, Finny. He envies Finny for his great Athletic ability. In spite of the envy, Gene and Finny do everything together and one day for fun they decide to jump out of a tree into the river. After that they form the Super Suicide Society, the first time they jumped being their reason for formation. During one of their meetings they decide to jump off at the same time. When they get up on the limb Gene bounces it and Finny falls on the bank. He shatters the bones in his leg and will never again play sports. Nobody realizes that Gene deliberately made Finny lose his balance. Because of the accident Gene does not play sports either and continues being friends with Finny. One night, some of the other guys from Devon School woke Gene and Finny up in the middle of the night. They are suspicious of the "accident." They conduct a trial to blame Gene for what has happened to Finny. Eventually Finny gets upset in the midst of argument and runs out. He ends up tripping and falling down the stairs, and breaking his healed leg allover again. It was a cleaner break this time but they still have to set it. Gene confesses to Finny that he bounced him out of the tree. While setting the break there are complications and Finny dies. Gene learns that he is his own person and now that Finny is gone he can finally be content with himself. In the beginning Gene feels inferior to Finny.
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.
Beyond the basic need for a sense of control, people are driven by their sense of identity, of who they are. Each person lives in their own universes, which are centered upon their feeling of self-purpose. There are multiple types of identities such as individual and group identities. Each person's identity is formed differently because of the unique experiences every individual encounters. The formation can be affected by many things such as their home environment, social concurrences, and physiological health. This story, A Separate Peace, exhibits interesting main characters which establish the frequent struggles of personal identity in adolescence.
Later on in the book, after the accident, when Gene looks at himself in the mirror while wearing Finny’s clothes, on page 54, it says “… it was no remote aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to life. … standing there (it seemed) that I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again.” That meant that following that day, he was going to try to live each day more like Finny. Through out the book Phineas taught Gene more and more about himself, he taught Gene to live each day to the fullest, because you might never have another.
Knowle’s novel, A Separate Peace, has a self contained meaning and theme, not connected to any other works. Throughout the novel, Finny creates a metaphorical shadow that eclipses Gene. Gene feels that he must live in this shadow, and becomes extremely envious, and develops a resentful hatred. Finny continuously convinces Gene to leave his homework, and go swimming or adventuring. These distractions only add to Gene’s resentful hatred. He feels that he must now compete with Finny, academically not athletically. “You would have had an A in that one [class] except for him. Except for him… Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies… That way he, the great athlete, would be way ahead of me,” (John Knowles 53.) This enforces the author’s theme, that humans will create enemies for themselves. The author expresses the idea that even when no conflict has arisen, humans will create their own enemies, and will make war agains...
In the story Gene and Phineas return to the branch again, but this time Gene makes Phineas lose his balance and fall. It is shown that Gene does this out of jealousy and hate. Gene declares “I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone [...] hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud” (Knowles 60). Gene does this profound action because he is jealous of Phineas and also infuriated by the fact Phineas is not jealous of Gene in the slightest bit. Gene thinks, “He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he” (Knowles 59). This is part of how Gene’s first fearful place was created. Gene realizes the dark and envious side of
Every person feels rivalry or competition towards others at some point in their lives. This rivalry greatly affects our ability to understand others, and this eventually results in paranoia and hostility. It is a part of human nature, that people coldly drive ahead for their gain alone. Man's inhumanity towards man is a way for people to protect themselves from having pain inflicted on them by others, and achieving their goals and desires without the interference of others. This concept of man's inhumanity to man is developed in A Separate Peace as the primary conflict in the novel centres on the main character, Gene, and his inner-battles with feelings of jealousy, paranoia, and inability to understand his relationship with his best friend Phineas. Competition is further demonstrated by the occurrence of World War II. It is shown that, "There were few relationships among us (the students) at Devon not based on rivalry." (p. 37) It is this rivalry and competition between the boys at Devon that ripped their friendships apart.
Analysis: This quote is based on the theme of envy. It is clear that Gene feels that Phineas can get away with anything. The reader can tell that Gene hate him because of this.
Gene is a well-educated, athletic individual. He takes his school work seriously and keeps to himself, meaning he doesn’t favor standing out or being in the spotlight. He is a follower, especially when it comes to his best friend, Phineas. Throughout the book, he often compares himself to Phineas and talks about how perfect Finny is.