A Separate Peace 'By John Knowles' Coming Of Age

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A Separate Peace “Coming of Age” “Coming of age” is a popular theme in literature. This theme has the meaning of growing up or maturing as a person. In the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Gene Forrester develops the theme of “coming of age”. Gene, Finny, and a couple other boys were hanging out and they climbed a tree. Gene was messing around and pushed Finny out of the tree, causing him to break his leg. "Isn't the bone supposed to be stronger when it grows together over a place where it's been broken once?" said Finny. Gene felt so guilty about causing him to break his leg because he didn’t mean for it to happen. Gene tried to apologize to Finny for what he did but the right time never came up. Finny is originally the best runner around, but when he falls from the tree branch and breaks his leg, he is forced to focus his attention on other things. Finny decides to train Gene as a runner for the 1944 Olympics. “And now I’m not sure, not a hundred percent sure I’ll be completely, you …show more content…

Finny’s leg was broken so bad that he had to have an operation done on it to set his leg back so it can properly heal. In the operating room there was an incident that happened that caused some of Finnys bone marrow to leak and it got into his blood stream causing Finny’s heart to stop. The doctors couldn’t revive Finny fast enough, resulting in Finny’s death. When Gene hears the news he doesn’t cry, because he is hurting so badly that he feels dead inside too. Everybody knows that Gene is feeling very upset and guilty about what happened because he feels that it was all his fault that Finny fell and broke his leg and caused his death. “None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or else because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.”

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