Jealousy In John Knowles A Separate Peace

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In A Separate Peace, the reader gets to follow Gene Forrester through one of the most influential years of his life, which includes seeing the mutual jealousy take place between Gene and his roommate Phineas, all seen through Gene's perspective. The name Phineas means "the mouth of a snake" and snakes are associated with slyness and untrustworthiness, which makes John Knowles choice of a name for this character fitting. Finny in this novel is a magnetic, charismatic character whom people cannot help liking, but is also manipulative, immature, and self-centered. He is not nearly as innocent as he seems.
Phineas has the amazing ability to calm people's suspicions with his easygoing smile and hypnotic words that "... induces others to temporarily suspend their practical, logical systems of belief to follow his non-logical argument, acted out either verbally or on the playing fields." (Witherington). Phineas is able to produce …show more content…

"You always win at sports...Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport. Nothing bad ever happened in sports." (Knowles 27) Sports are the one aspect in life that Phineas should not be able to even feign ignorance. Both of the games that Phineas set up were "anarchic, based only on “reverses and deceptions" (Kennedy) some may see it as carefree, but others would see it as conniving. Phineas will use his so-called "innocence" to manipulate people and get out of trouble as seen when he excuses his actions of jumping out of a tree with the ongoing war happening beyond Devon, "'We had to do that, naturally,' he went on, 'because we are all getting ready for war. What if they lower the draft age to 17?" (Knowles 15) Consequently, Phineas never is able to gain the maturity one gets from experiencing the repercussions of his or her

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