Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." "Yourself,"… I am thinking about the time when my best friend died, and when I stopped being myself and my life started going to hell.
It happened maybe two or three years ago. The day is very clear in my memory. The weather was cold and nasty. The monotonous rain made everything outside look gray. I was at home, waiting for my girlfriend to arrive. I was sitting on the couch drinking hot tea and feeling warm and cozy. My cat was there too, I remember. We were watching a Mexican soap opera, and I think the cat was enjoying it, but I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on. All I cared about was that my girlfriend was finally coming home and that we would be able to see each other again. She had left only four weeks earlier, but I missed her greatly. We had been friends since the first grade. In the beginning we were the worst enemies; we just hated each other. Oh, how we fought! One time she accused me of taking her marker, even though I did not know what marker she was talking about. I remember her mother came to school and everyone was mad at me and was convinced that I was guilty. Later she found her marker. It seems she had put it in a wrong box. This turned out to be the first, but not the last, accident that would occur. What didn’t we argue about? After a while, hmmm, five years, we became the best friends ever. We were perfectly compatible with each other.
We began spending all of our time together. We were vital to each other. I came to know each and every detail about her as she did about me. My life was intertwined with her life and her life was intertwined with mine. It was the most enduring friendship of my life. I looked at the clock above my head. Four fifty. She was supposed to arrive at three o’clock. I felt uncomfortable; some weird feeling crawled around my heart. I did not understand it. I waited and waited.
It was dark already and I was afraid of being in solitude. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Five o’clock.
The phone rang and it startled me. Who might it be? I wasn’t expecting a phone call from anyone.
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.
A Separate Peace is a coming of age novel in which Gene, the main character, revisits his high school and his traumatic teen years. When Gene was a teen-ager his best friend and roommate Phineas (Finny) was the star athlete of the school.
Through out the book A Separate Peace, Gene, his growth and harmony seem to change. His opinions, and outlook on life also seem to change as his relationship with Phineas does likewise. Gene’s self-perception changes from insecurity to imitation to independence as his relationship with Phineas changes.
A friendship without mutual love and respect leads to selfishness and jealousy. In A Separate Peace, Gene remains envious of his best friend: Finny’s good looks, his ability to charm everyone that he meets, his ability to take charge, and his natural athleticism. As their friendship flourishes, Gene becomes desirous of Finny’s physical appearance and his build. Finny uses his ability to take charge and organizes the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session. Before each meeting, Finny and Gene jump from the tree that overlooks the river. Prior to one meeting, both climb the tree to begin the meeting; when they make it to the top of the tree, Gene takes the opportunity to wiggle the branch. As a result, Finny falls, which ends Finny’s athleticism and changes his life. Gene’s guilt leads him to lie multiple times to cover his spiteful endeavor. His guiltiness causes him to confess to Phineas. Finny never accepts Gene’s reason for an apology; Phineas only agrees to the fact after Leper explains in detail what happens on that dreadful day. In a rage, Finny falls down the marble stairs, which causes another break and ends his life. In the novel, A Separate Peace, John Knowles illustrates the contrast between a friendship of jealousy and one of love through foreshadowing, metaphors, and symbolism.
Dealing with enemies has been a problem since the beginning of time. “I never killed anybody,” Gene had commented later in his life, “And I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform, I was on active duty all my time at Devon; I killed my enemy there.” In A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the value of dealing with enemies is shown by Gene, who was dealing with few human enemies, but his emotions created far greater rivals than any human could ever posses.
The novel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, tells the story of the narrator, Gene Forrester, and the tribulations he and his friends partake in. None of these friends compare to one such as Elwin Lepellier, also known as Leper. At first glance Leper appears to be an insignificant character and is not expected to play an important role. Look at the meaning of the word “leper”; a leper is a person who is shunned or rejected by others for reasons that can be either social or even moral. This indicates a deeper meaning to his character that the reader only gets a taste of at the opening of the book. Leper, extraneous to the reader at the start, proves to be essential to major events along the storyline.
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.
Often, one may sense a conflict that one must fight against an intangible enemy that one feels is there. The temptation of competition, envy, or peer pressure can cause one to change one’s actions and ideals, even when this conflict only prevails in one’s own mind. When the mind generates a war that does not even exist, the premise is most likely an incomprehension of the subject matter, leading to assumption about the situation based on one’s knowledge, creating a self-waged war. These controlling cranial concoctions remain an important theme in literature, especially literary compositions on the subject of historical wars themselves. One such example lies in A Separate Peace by John Knowles, a novel on the subject of World War II from the perspective of prep school students. In the novel, the protagonist Gene creates his own wars based on the ignorant presumption that his associates compete with him, his personal battles reflect the large-scale wars fought by adults, and Knowles utilizes these personal wars to convey a moral lessson to the reader.
From past, present, to future, conflict has defined history. In a world full of battles, revolutions, and seemingly random acts of evil, it is impossible to escape the reality of it all. Many of today’s great classics have been inspired by generations of conflict. Using World War II as the background for John Knowles’ novel A Separate Peace brings up the question if it is ever possible to live in a world without fear, hate and ultimately inevitable conflict. Knowles uses contrasting characters, the innate nature of humans, and contradictory symbols in order to reflect that conflict is inevitable.
Finny represented childhood. Firstly, Finny tries to enjoy life. Whenever finny faced a difficult situation he would not worry about it and instead play a game. Finny was always playing games and influenced everyone else to play games as well. When Gene returned from his visit to leper he “found him in the middle of a snow ball fight.” (p.152) Gene went on to say “This gathering had obviously been Finny’s work. Who else could have inveigled twenty people to the farthest extremity of the school to throw snowballs at each other?” (p.153) these quotes show that it was common for Phineas to gather large amounts of people and play games with them. Secondly, when Finny broke his leg Gene focused on non-childlike tasks. While visiting Finny at his house Finny asked Gene “‘you aren’t going to start living by the rules, are you?’ I grinned at him ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that,’ and that was the most false thing, the biggest lie of all.” (p.71). Gene started following the school rules again. Gene acted more mature and because of Finny’s absence there was no one to make him do otherwise. This shows that without Finny, Gene matures and becomes adult like. Thirdly, Finny makes Gene do actions Gene would otherwise never do. Finny once said “‘let’s go to the beach’” (p.45). and after thought of the risks like the fact that “going there risked expulsion” (p.46). Gene said “All right”(p.46). This shows that like Finny is trying to make gene have a good time while it is still possible. Finny being childhood means that he must be left behind in order for Gene to mature.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper paints both a disturbing image and an enlightening one as well in her poem, Bury Me in a Free Land, where she even in death opposes the tyranny of the American style of slavery. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s uses of vivid imagery bombarding all of the senses in her pleas to be buried in a land where slavery is no longer an issue and where all men and women are equally free. In the third and fourth stanzas, Harper describes in a very few words the anguish, horror, sorrow, and despair of being forced to endure the extreme agony of living under a cruel taskmaster, namely the American Slaveholder of the nineteenth century prior to the War of Northern Aggression as many Southerners viewed the war between the states of the union. Harper’s depictions and descriptions throughout the poem reach a cumulative apex in the third and fourth stanzas by forcing the reader to see through their tears the inhumane treatment of “coffle-gang” work parties and the agony of a mother as her children are torn away from her breasts (Harper 10).
PURPOSE: The purpose of the experiment is to determine the specific types of pigments found in water-soluble marker pens by using paper chromatography and water as a solvent.
that she does not want to use or waste it. This can also be shown, as
The lives and prosperity of millions of people depend on peace and, in turn, peace depends on treaties - fragile documents that must do more than end wars. Negotiations and peace treaties may lead to decades of cooperation during which disputes between nations are resolved without military action and economic cost, or may prolong or even intensify the grievances which provoked conflict in the first place. In 1996, as Canada and the United States celebrated their mutual boundary as the longest undefended border in the world, Greece and Turkey nearly came to blows over a rocky island so small it scarcely had space for a flagpole.1 Both territorial questions had been raised as issues in peace treaties. The Treaty of Ghent in 1815 set the framework for the resolution of Canadian-American territorial questions. The Treaty of Sevres in 1920, between the Sultan and the victorious Allies of World War I, dismantled the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and distributed its territories. Examination of the terms and consequences of the two treaties clearly establishes that a successful treaty must provide more than the absence of war.
When we are young children, we are introduced to the concept of "living happily ever after". This is a fairy-tale emotional state of absolute happiness, where nothing really happens, and nothing even seems to matter. It is a state of feeling good all the time. In fairy tales, this feeling is usually found in fulfilling marriages, royal castles, singing birds and laughing children. In real life, an even-keeled mood is more psychologically healthy than a mood in which you frequently achieve great heights of happiness. Furthermore, when you ask people what makes their lives worth living, they rarely mention their mood. They are more likely to talk about what they find meaningful, such as their work or relationships. Research suggests that if you focus too much on trying to feel good all the time, you’ll actually undermine your ability to ever feel good because no amount of feeling good will be satisfying to you. If feeling good all the time were the only requirement for happiness, then a person who uses cocaine every day would be extremely happy. In our endless struggle for more money, more love and more security, we have forgotten the most fundamental fact: happiness is not caused by possessions or social positions, and can in fact be experienced in any daily activity. We have made happiness a utopia: expensive, complicated, and unreachable.