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Character analysis of a separate peace
Character analysis of a separate peace
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ASP In-Class Essay
When a person does something that hurts others, one will likely experience regret for the harm their actions. In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, the theme of guilt and its effects on your behavior, self-image, and your interactions with others is explored. Gene, in the beginning, sees Finny as his best friend, and relies on him for support and friendship; however, after Gene causes Finny to break his leg, his guilt causes him to change is personality and self-image. Their friendship is damaged by Gene’s guilt.
After Phineas breaks his leg, Gene is nervous that he will be exposed for injuring his friend and punished. He is afraid of losing his reputation as a good kid or having to take responsibility
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If he can help Phineas and not mention the accident, he can heal his own insecurities of being a bad friend. When Phineas returns to Devon, he finds out about Gene’s ideas of joining the draft, “Phineas was shocked at the idea of my leaving. In some way he needed me. He needed me.” (108). Once Phineas returns, Phineas becomes reliant on Gene. Gene no longer sees Phineas as a perfect person, but as a crippled friend who needs him. But Phineas also needs Gene because everyone else at Devon is going to go to join the war and become an adult. Phineas would be left alone without any friends. In order to retain some aspect of continuity, Phineas needs Gene’s support and friendship now more than ever. When Phineas falls later a second time, Gene wants to console him but realizes he missed what was really there, “...as they raised him up he looked very strange to me, like some tragic and exalted personage, a stricken pontiff. Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him” (179). When Phineas injures himself again in worsened manner, Gene realizes Phineas did not need his sympathy. Phineas experienced physical weakness but displayed a hidden inner strength he had not detected. Phineas’ fate was tragically resulting in death but Gene could not comprehend his friendship until after Phineas died and Gene became an adult. After reflection, Gend was able to realize …show more content…
After visiting Devon as an adult, Gene reflects on his own life in the aftermath of his friend's death saying, “Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way for sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations” (202). After Finny dies, he tries to atone for his mistakes by living life inspired by Phineas’ joy and goofiness. Gene hopes to make up for Finny’s death by living through him. The life he chooses is silly and without tradition. Gene sacrifices his own personal desires to make up for his previous sins. When Phineas is in the hospital Gene is able to admit and convince Phineas that he caused the accident, saying, “It was some blind impulse you had on the tree there...Yes, yes, that was it...I think I can believe you, I think I can believe that” pg 191. Gene is able to push aside his own desires and do what is right. He stills sees him as his friend but Gene feels that their friendship is healed now that he has admitted his mistake. Since he knows Phineas is sick, he has to tell him the truth so he no longer has to lie to himself or others. Phineas previously was in a period of denial of his horrible actions and tells the
Gene’s experiences throughout the novel, along with Phineas’ death, contribute to his survival and progression as a person. Gene realizes the only enemy he ever had was himself, and becomes pure and Phineas-filled after he confronts and conquers himself. Knowles compares a New England prep school to the Garden of Eden to show man’s flawed nature and that man always ruins what he can not understand.
At the Devon School, the climate of war creates an even greater impedance in the way of Gene and Phineas’ development, as now both characters must attempt to understand death. For Gene at such a young age, death has never been a part of his life until Phineas dies. Phineas has always been fated to die, but Gene is not able to comprehend this until Finny falls down the marble stairs at the First Academy Building. On revisiting the marble stairs, Gene recognizes their “exceptional hardness” (Knowles 11). The hardness that Gene speaks of is representative of the hardness of coping with war and death during such a crucial developmental time. This imagery is utilized by Knowles in A Separate Peace to define that until Gene recognizes the incomprehensible nature of war and death, he will never escape the liminal state. By watching Phineas fall down the marble stairs, Gene is enlightened to the fact that war is real, death cannot be avoided, and both can never be
Gene believes that people are deliberately out to get him and concentrates only on grasping the evil within his friends. Therefore, Gene decides to defeat his enemies before he gets defeated himself. During the summer session at Devon, Gene encounters a dark suspicion that his friend Finny is drawing him away from his studies in order to make him fail. This makes sense to Gene since he religiously follows the rules to win approval from the staff at Devon, and anyone who persuades him to disobey these rules wishes failure upon him. Therefore, Finny
Guilt is a powerful emotion that can affect the path of a person’s life. Dunstan’s character in Robertson Davies’s “Fifth Business” experienced guilt at an early age and stayed with Dunstan throughout his life, and continually affected his relationships with Mrs.Dempster, Boy and Paul into an unhealthy one. Dunstan took the blame for the snow ball entirely without acknowledging boy was at fault. “I was contrite and guilty, for I knew that the snowball had been meant for me” (Davies, 11). From that point in his life, his guilt had the dynamo effect. He took blame for every tragedy that happened to the Dempster family since. Dunstan’s battled guilt ultimately controlled his action and relationships.
When the novel starts Gene is lost and confused about his feeling towards Phineas, he is not sure if he is jealous or just looking up to Phineas. However, the moment he causes Phineas to fall off the tree he realizes his inner-self and realizes his true feelings. He realizes that it was not a little jealousy or anything else but it was hate that was building up inside him. He first realized what his true emotion was when he...
Throughout the novel, Gene is constantly envying Finny because he describes him with many god-like traits that he himself does not possess. Gene sees that “Phineas could get away with anything” even when he gets into trouble, and starts to admit he “couldn 't help envying [Finny] [...] which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little” (Knowles 25 ). However, when Gene becomes paranoid that Finny is also envious of his academic success but then realizes that this is not true, his jealousy develops into enmity as he sees that Finny is naturally pure and good willed at heart- something he is not. Because he “was not of the same quality as [Finny]” (59), Gene unleashes his anger by physically harming Finny. In the end, Finny’s death is the outcome of Gene’s actions which are provoked by his initial feelings of jealousy. Gene loses a good friend, but his remorse has allowed him to take on a new identity has Finny, eventually forcing him to let go of his true self. Overall, one is able to witness from Gene that emotions can do a significant amount of damage to relationships, as well as cause an individual to lose themselves in the
...e up to. Gene feels he has an advantage over Finny, the enemy, because he feels like he knows how Finny’s mind works. To Gene Finny is a spy trying to infiltrate his schedule and destroy his goals of being the best student at Devon.
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.
Gene is the narrator and protagonist of A Separate Peace. He suffers from all PDF the regular teenager ailments; self consciousness, jealousy, an identity crisis, and uncertainty. It is obvious from the start that Gene holds a great deal of admiration for Finny. Finny is a hero, an athlete, and a God in Genes eyes. Gene admires Finny, but naturally, Finny is also the competition. Finny gains what Gene lacks. Finny has the talents for sports, better conversation and actions and could easily be described as the perfect "Devon student". Gene May get better grades, but he goes unnoticed while Finny is able to corral the boys into any activity and talk even Gene himself into breaking the rules. Gene admits to jouncing the limb of the tree on that one summer day of 1942, and he even admits his crime to Finny. It is unknowing whether this crime was subconscious, a blind impulse or consciously malevolent. The source of our facts is Gene himself which makes it even more of a rocky situation. It could be that Gene over stricken with guilt jounced the branch, or that he has imagined these antagonist thoughts which were never really t...
Gene symbolizes inner war, while Finny symbolizes a sense of peace. Gene is the jealous one in the friendship, and he is also the one to immediately jump to conclusions. Finny is a little stubborn and manipulative, but he tries his hardest to be a good person. An example to prove this statement is when Gene suddenly assumed that Finny was trying to sabotage his achievements during school. When Gene reacted to this by being jealous of Finny, it showed that he was the type to make assumptions off of little factual evidence. Gene’s jealousy and hatred towards Finny resulted in him purposefully inflicting harm on Finny. Finny is the type of boy to try and talk himself out of anything, making him very manipulative and liked around Devon. The book causes the reader to believe that Finny was liked by most of his classmates and his teachers, this giving him an advantage when he tried to get out of trouble. The book gives us many examples of this. One being when Finny was late because of jumping off of the limb, and another when he talked himself out of trouble for wearing a pink shirt and a tie as a belt.
Ellis proves how every symbol is relevant to the novels meaning of transferring from innocence, to adulthood. One important aspect and symbol that Ellis connects to the loss of innocence to adulthood is the Devon tree. Ellis reveals that “both fall from innocence and at the same time prepare himself for the second world war” and that “this tree is a temptation” thanks to Phineas (Ellis 34). James Ellis explains that from Gene and Finny jumping from the Devon tree during the Summer Session, it imitates a new loss of innocence because Gene gives into Finny’s temptation of jumping, rather than listening to his own secluded mind and respect towards following the rules. Finny, falling into the temptation of the tree, and Gene, giving into Finny’s dare of jumping from the tree into the Devon river, allows them to officially initiate the start of their second world war, in this case the start of their adulthood. In addition to the Devon Tree corresponding with the start of adulthood, Ellis explains how the two rivers are a symbolic meaning towards the loss of innocence. Ellis says, “The Devon, a familiar and bucolic river suggestive of Eden, that Finny and Gene had jumped from the tree. But after his fall from innocence, Gene experiences a baptism of a different sort as he plunges into the Naguamsett” (37). Ellis reveals that the
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.”
Because Gene is dishonest he imagines that everyone else is as well. Gene imagines that Finny’s character is exactly the same as his, which of course it isn’t. Gene builds up hate, anger and fear of the character that he has given to Finny. Since this is his own character and not Finny’s at all, the emotions that Gene feels towards this character are really what he feels towards his own character.
Deception involving the accident of Phineas falling out of the tree was because of Gene and what he would or would not say about the event that took place up in the tree. “I couldn’t make the last confession” (Knowles 162), is what Gene said close to the end of the novel. Gene deceived Phineas about the accident every time it was brought up by not telling him the truth about how he really fell. Gene was very deceptive which caused his relationship with Phineas very difficult in Genes mind.
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.