The book, A Separate Peace, written by John Knowles, can be related to adolescence in several ways. The attendants of this school face many new experiences during the course of their stay, many of which occur in their last year. This is where the book picks up. The book takes place at the Devon School, in the summer session of 1942. Throughout this book, the children are constantly fighting and fearing adulthood and their future. The pressure to be successful and layout a plan for the future is always upon students in school. Also, the constant reminder of World War || lays like heavy blankets over them, smothering at all times. Many of the students at the Devon School accept this pressure and continue to press on, while others may crack. Adolescence is conveyed throughout this book through many points. One of which is the society established by both Gene and Finny, known as the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session.
The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was the main activity that kept the student's minds off the war. Their society was established on the banks of the Devon River, a river that passed through school grounds. This river was quite the opposite of the Naguamsett River. The Naguamsett was rough, cloudy, and unpredictable, much like the students' futures. The Devon River was smooth and fresh, with clear waters, and was pure like their childhood. To join the society, you would have to jump from the tree into the river, testing your courage. Once it had been done, everyone else wanted to try and out-jump the prior jumper. This changed the student's perception of the tree from soldier training to fun and games. Finny established this game because he was not one to let the depression of the war overcome him. He always tried to make others happy, going to any extreme to get a laugh. He was the sign of peace, childhood and fun at Devon. Without Finny, the students would soon lose touch with their childhood, turning all their attention onto the war.
Adolescence was also shown through Finny's clothing. Finny had no inhibitions, which was conveyed very well through his pink shirt and tie-belt. The pink shirt and tie-belt served as an emblem, because news had just arrived of the bombing overseas. Finny wore this to tea, something no one else would dare ever do.
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 writes a compelling realistic fiction about the lives of two teenage boys throughout the start of World War II in his novel A Separate Peace. Peter Yates the director of the movie plays the story out in a well organized theatrical manner. There are similarities and differences in these two works of art. However; there are also similarities.
Finny is a rebellious, charming, and very athletic boy. His charisma comes from his ability to make up rules and ideas on the spot and being able to get out of any trouble which is magnetic to the other boys at Devon. Most of the teachers admired Phineas because he was the poster boy of boys not yet affected by the war as mentioned by Gene when he says " But there was another reason. I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. [...] We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives that were not bound up with destruction,". (Knowles 24) While the war rages on the boys of the school begin to adjust to their fates, showing their more negative emotions such as hatred for the enemy. Gene believed that everyone chose their enemy at some point, hated at some point. But what made Finny different was that he never did. Phineas in all his actions was good intentioned. He saw the world as a giant playground. The game he invented, Blitz Ball, is a game where no one actually wins or loses. Blitz Ball's whole idea is enjoying the pure fun of the game and not the outcome which shows who Finny really is as a person. He sees the goodness in everyone and expects that everyone else does the same. (Which can also cause him to look arrogant and selfish at times which Finny never becomes fully aware of.) This blind eye to evil leads to Finny's downfall (literally) as he doesn't realize the burdens Gene holds
The general theme of “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is “Let things run their natural course; don’t bring conflict upon yourself by trying to defy nature”. When the angel comes, the very wise old woman tells them that he must be here to take their child but they don’t listen to her intelligent advice. “Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of spiritual conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop”. Pelayo defies nature by not letting the Angel go, and hence the Angel is locked up “as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal”. At the end of the story the wife watches the angel fly away and realizes that now he is now longer an annoyance in her life. If the...
The last two decades of the twentieth century gave rise to turbulent times for constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, eventually leading them to split apart. There were a number of damaging aspects of past history and of the political and economic circumstances that contributed to the breakup and eventually caused the situation to snowball into a deadly series of inter-ethnic conflicts. Yugoslavia was reunified at the end of the war when the communist forces of Josip Broz Tito liberated the country. Under Tito, Yugoslavia adopted a relatively liberal form of government in comparison to other East European communist states at the time and experienced a period of relative economic and political stability until Tito’s death in 1980. In addition to internal power struggles following the loss of their longtime leader, Yugoslavia faced an unprecedented economic crisis in the 1980’s. As other communist states began to fall in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, some former Communist leaders abandoned communism and founded or supported ethno-national parties, blaming the economic suffering on the flaws of communism and other ethnic groups. The ethnic violence that followed would not have been possible without the willingness of politicians from every side to promote ethno-nationalist symbols and myths through media blitzes, which were especially effective due to low levels of education in the former Yugoslavia. Shadows of the events of World War II gave these politicians, especially the Serbs, an opportunity to encourage the discussion and exaggeration of past atrocities later in the century. The ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia can be traced back to a series of linked damaging factors such as the de...
Gene was only a mediocre athlete and is always jealous of Finny. They form a Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session which includes jumping from a tree into a river as its initiation. Eventually, Finny falls from the tree fracturing his leg. This leads to Finny’s death and Gene struggle to find himself. The relationship between these two boys proves my thesis statement; a friend and an enemy can be one in the same.
In the early pages of the novel, Finny confesses that Gene is his best friend. This is considered a courageous act as the students at Devon rarely show any emotion. And rather than coming back with similar affection, Gene holds back and says nothing. Gene simply cannot handle the fact that Finny is so compassionate, so athletic, so ingenuitive, so perfect. As he put it, "Phineas could get away with anything." (p. 18) In order to protect himself from accepting Finny's compassion and risking emotional suffering, Gene creates a silent rivalry with Finny, and convinced himself that Finny is deliberately attempting to ruin his schoolwork. Gene decides he and Finny are jealous of each other, and reduces their friendship to cold trickery and hostility. Gene becomes disgusted with himself after weeks of the silent rivalry. He finally discovers the truth, that Finny only wants the best for Gene, and had no hidden evil intentions. This creates a conflict for Gene as he is not able to deal with Finny's purity and his own dark emotions. On this very day Finny wants to jump off of the tree branch into the Devon river at the same time as Gene, a "double jump" (p. 51), he says, as a way of bonding. It was this decision, caused by Finny's affection for Gene and outgoing ways that resulted in drastic change for the rest of his life.
Yugoslavia was a very diverse, ethnic, and peaceful place under communist rule ("Genocide in Bosnia--1992-1995"). For 40 years it stayed this way ("Genocide in Bosnia--1992-1995"). Provinces declared...
Along with their friends, Gene and Finny play games and joke about the war instead of taking it seriously and preparing for it. Finny organizes the Winter Carnival, invents the game of Blitz Ball, and encourages his friends to have a snowball fight. When Gene looks back on that day of the Winter Carnival, he says, "---it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace" (Knowles, 832). As he watches the snowball fight, Gene thinks to himself, "There they all were now, the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with their high IQs and expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs"(843). Another of the principal themes in this novel is the theme of maturity.
"Bosnian Genocide." The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Terrorism. Patricia D. Netzley. Ed. Moataz A. Fattah. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2007.World History in Context. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.
Once the Cold War ended, the Socialist Federal of Yugoslavia was led by Josip Broz Tito, an enigmatic dictator. He kept great control numerous ethnic, religious, and nationalist groups. When Tito died, politicians started turning Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks against each other. Soon, the Bosnia Genocide started which claimed approximately 100,000 people’s lives. About 80 percent of the people killed were Bosniaks.
If I ask you to picture an angel, what do you see? Is it a vibrant white, majestically dressed individual with lush and strong wings who commands reverence with his presence? What does this ethereal creature stand for? Righteousness? Protector of good and the purest form of a celestial being besides God? If you have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” then you may have been introduced to a conflicting image of an angel. This angel is in no way similar to the one described above. Actually, we are not even sure he is an angel. What we do know after reading this story is that the creature presented represents the overwhelming need of humans to understand and interpret every facet of their lives. The angel does not fit the general consensus of what an angel is and leaves human expectations unmet. This story embodies the nature of humans to explain, categorize, and label any affair that is not already so.
Imagine waking up one day to the thundering of blows given at the door telling you to “open up or be shot down.” It is the Serb police, and they are telling you that you and your whole family had to leave your home immediately. This is how it went for many Albanian people during what some Serb extremists called “demographic genocide.” This was the beginning of what many would call the Kosovo War, and it lasted from March to June 1999. After NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, something strange happened. Now the people being victimized were the Serbs and anyone who was “friendly” to them. In this paper, I will speak about what happened before and after the war in Kosovo.
The conflict between the Albanians and Serbs has been a continual issue since the fourteenth century. Ethnic conflicts rose again after the death of Tito who was the leader of Yugoslavia. Tito set up a national Yugoslav government and let the five Slavic nationalities (Serb, Croat, Slovene, Montenegrin, and Macedonian) govern their own part of Yugoslavia which suppressed any ethnic fighting (Andryszewski 14). After the death of Tito in 1980, ethnic conflicts began to come to surface again. Slobodan Milosevic gave a speech to the Serbs in Kosovo saying that “No one will dare to beat you again” (Andryszweski 18). In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia which led to the outbreak of war since the Serb-dominated central government wanted to preserve the state. In 1995, the Dayton Peace Settlement was signed to end the war and Yugoslavia broke apart ove...
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution took years and years of research. Throughout these years he found different people who were also interested in this phenomena and had them join him in the study. Before Charles conducted his research he looked back in time to other scientists who wrote about this theory. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, believed there were natural laws in how the world came to be. “He believed that there were “higher” species and also “lower” species, and the lower ones gave rise to the higher” (Rosenberger 3). He believed against the usual myths about how the universe came to be and had similar ideas to Darwin. In 1831, Charles was asked by Capt. Robert Fitz-Roy to set sail on the H. M. S. Beagle, which sailed around the world. “Charles was to record information about the geology,...