A Separate Peace: A Synical Analysis Of A Separate Peace

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1. Brinker is an antagonist to Gene. Brinker tries to get under Gene's skin about Gene's inner conflicts. Even if it is about Gene’s role in Finny's accident, joining the war effort or what Leper is up to, Brinker attempts to put Gene over the edge. 2. After Finny’s accident, one of Gene’s major inner conflicts is his attempt to become like Finny, but while still being himself. When Gene goes to visit Leper, Leper tells Gene about these hallucinations he has been having. After one of Gene’s comments, Leper starts to say that the visions have to do with Gene. But Gene runs away from Leper declaring that the visions have “nothing to do with [him]” and that he “[doesn’t] want to hear any more of it,” he proves just how close to the heart Leper’s visions have impacted him: the nightmarish metamorphoses are a dark reflection not only of the transformations that he and his classmates face but also of Gene’s own attempts to become Finny, to copy Finny’s clothes and lose himself in Finny’s identity. 1. The tree is the crucial symbol in the novel. The tree represents the enormous fear in which Gene lived at school, from the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1943. When he was a student at Devon, the tree seemed "tremendous" to Gene, "an irate, steely black steeple beside the river." When Gene does climb the tree, he enters into "a mild state of shock." He jumps from the tree "with the sensation that I was throwing my life away . . . ." Finally Gene returns to The Devon School after fifteen years and the tree is the main focus of his visit. Going to the river, Gene has trouble even differentiating it from the other trees. When he does identify it, the tree seems smaller to Gene, "shrunken by age." It seems "weary from age, enfeebled, dry... ... middle of paper ... ... on life. 4. The quote by John Ruskin, “At least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning to get at his meaning, not to find yours” is saying that the reader needs to find the real meaning of something as written by the author. This quote says that your own perception of something might be completely different from the real meaning as portrayed by the author. John Ruskin advocates that the readers needs to discover the actual meaning and use that rather than having your meaning and it leading the reader to a completely different outlook. A person must be careful when reading a book with symbolism because what something symbolizes can change the whole book. For example, if the reader does not read a book thoroughly and make assumptions about what that thing symbolizes, the whole book can be changed, and your opinion of the book will vary inaccurately.

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