Loss Of Innocence In A Separate Peace

Tom Stoppard once said, “Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up”. Just as in A Separate Peace, the boys are forced to give up their innocence in exchange for adulthood. This loss of innocence is best shown through Phineas’s fall off of the tree, the two seasonal school sessions, and the war.

Phineas’s fall off of the tree marks the climax of the story and the progression from childhood to adulthood that is caused by a loss of innocence. After the fall, Gene stays in his room trying “to forget where [he] was, even who [he] was” (62) because his evil has filled him with immense guilt that absolutely crushes him. Gene is trying to forget who he is because he cannot believe that he has just hurt his best friend. By having to deal with this guilt Gene is pulled from his adolescence into adulthood. Phineas also experiences this pull when he realizes what Gene has done to him. At this time Phineas yells “want to break something else in me” (184) at Gene because his world has been shattered by the realization of his best friend has crippled him for life. Phineas’s fall signified the end of the adolescence of Gene and his

transgression toward adulthood. Thus the fall separated the novel into two sections, the summer and winter seasons.
Summer was the time of their childhood innocence that lasted blissfully up to the point that they lost it. The teachers “appeared to uncoil” (23) and the boys played Phineas’s new game, blitzball. The teachers’ uncoiling was their appreciation of the peace that paralleled the boys’ childhood ignorance. All of this changed suddenly, when the summer season ends with Phineas’s fall off of the tree. At this point the boys began their winter school year and were forced to enter adulthood with stricter teachers and more pressure on their enlistment into the war. In addition to this they also begin to work, doing various jobs such as shoveling snow off railroad tracks that were described as “hard and unwavering”(96). Knowles’s description of their work shows how difficult the life of an adult is and how the boys have progressed into that life. By undergoing these changes the boys lose their childhood mindset and are pushed from adolescence to maturity. This does not include Phineas however. Phineas’s pureness and refusal to accept evil, and therefore the existence of the war, makes him such a good person that he is unable to live in the world of regular humans. It is for this reason that the sounds of “his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs” (177) are made. Phineas died not because the world couldn’t handle him, but because he couldn’t handle the world. Through Phineas Knowles shows that loss of innocence is integral to becoming an adult and without it, like Phineas, people would not be able to survive because the evil in this world, such as war, would overwhelm them.
World War II epitomizes the real adult world that the boys will have to face in the near future after they have lost their innocence.

It is shown not only through direct references but also through words such as when Gene returns to the tree after fifteen years and compares it to an “artillery piece” (13). Knowles’s use of this type of military diction shows what the boys will have to deal with as an adult and how this change is inevitable. By frequently incorporating it, he recreates the boys’ situation where the war was a constant reminder, no matter how subtle it was. Through this he is able to compare how dreary the life of an adult is and how blissful it is to be young and ignorant. With this he is able to bring into question the life of people and how they live. If they only have a tough future life to look forward to, why should they

grow?
The symbolism in A Separate Peace shows through Phineas’s fall and the summer and winter season that loss of innocence allows people to grow and is ultimately required for maturation, although the war shows that the loss of innocence may be a curse for mankind.