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The separate peace essay
Commentaries on John Knowles' Separate Peace
Summary of a separate peace by John Knowles
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A Separate Peace by John Knowles shows that Gene, Finny, and Leper set up Maginot Lines that are ineffective and eventually lead to their own destruction. Gene builds himself a mental Maginot Line against Finny, leading to a loss of self-identity. A Maginot Line was a defense structure that France built along its border with Italy and Germany during WWII, which included machine gun posts, concrete walls, tank obstacles, and artillery casements. Gene is becoming a very dedicated student, trying to be better than Finny, and realizing that Finny was also working hard in school, for “The new attacks of studying were his emergency measures to save himself. I redoubled my effort” (25). Gene, realizing that Finny is working hard to better his grade, begins to study to become top student and prove himself to Finny. Gene was stunned when he realized that “he [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not …show more content…
Leper’s Maginot Lines were not only set up against Gene and Finny, but also the majority of his friends. When Gene hears about Leper’s enlistment, he thinks to himself “his enlistment seemed just another of Leper’s vagaries, such as the time he slept on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine”. By doing this he is able to shield himself against his friends, using the physical distance he places between them.While Leper and Gene were discussing the war, Gene brought up brinker and “he [Leper] broke into sobs…. Hoarse, cracking sobs broke from him”(79). When Leper returned from the war, not only was he unstable, but his Maginot Lines that he set up to distance himself from his friends began to crumble. Leper set up Maginot Lines to keep his friends out and doing so, when he wanted to let them back in, they did not want to return. He lost the friendship of Gene, Finny and
Throughout A Separate Peace, Knowles carefully, yet successfully develops the inevitable loss of innocence theme. He is able to prove the Latin inscription “Here Boys Come to Be Made Men” (165), by describing the necessity of transition to adulthood. If Finny never accepted the tragedy that occurred to him and the new perspective of the world, he wouldn’t have been able to live beyond his illusion. If Leper didn’t let go of his imaginary world of nature, he would not have been able to become the individual he is at the end of the novel. And if Gene did not try to fight his enemy he would not have resolved the issue of self-identity. Knowles effectively develops the theme, thus portraying it as a necessary part of life.
In the novel A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, Gene and Finny have boarding school experiences during World War II. Finny helps Gene mature throughout the story. Finny is an archetypal Jesus because of he preaches his ideas to his peers, his death is similar to Jesus’s, and his charismatic personality.
The American Library Association defines a challenge to a book as, “an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based on the objections of a person or group” (“About Banned). A Separate Peace by John Knowles was one of the many challenged books of its time; it was ranked sixty-seventh on the American Literature Association’s list of most challenged classic novels The book continues to be challenged all over the country and in 2013 it is ranked thirty-fifth on the summer of banned books list .(ALA). A Separate Peace chronicles the life of a boy named Gene Forrester, a student of the prestigious Devon School in New Hampshire. In Gene’s first year at Devon. He becomes close friends with his daredevil of a roommate Finny. Secretly Gene somewhat
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion. It is harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) A Separate Peace (1959) written by John Knowles, expresses the true struggle to respect ones individuality. In 1942 at a private school in New Hampshire Gene Forrester became good friends with his roommate, Finny. He envies Finny for his great Athletic ability. In spite of the envy, Gene and Finny do everything together and one day for fun they decide to jump out of a tree into the river. After that they form the Super Suicide Society, the first time they jumped being their reason for formation. During one of their meetings they decide to jump off at the same time. When they get up on the limb Gene bounces it and Finny falls on the bank. He shatters the bones in his leg and will never again play sports. Nobody realizes that Gene deliberately made Finny lose his balance. Because of the accident Gene does not play sports either and continues being friends with Finny. One night, some of the other guys from Devon School woke Gene and Finny up in the middle of the night. They are suspicious of the "accident." They conduct a trial to blame Gene for what has happened to Finny. Eventually Finny gets upset in the midst of argument and runs out. He ends up tripping and falling down the stairs, and breaking his healed leg allover again. It was a cleaner break this time but they still have to set it. Gene confesses to Finny that he bounced him out of the tree. While setting the break there are complications and Finny dies. Gene learns that he is his own person and now that Finny is gone he can finally be content with himself. In the beginning Gene feels inferior to Finny.
In chapter 10, Gene visits Leper at his house after he wrote a note to Gene saying that he had escaped and he was at a Christmas location. When he got there, Leper was very jumpy and short tempered. As Gene and Leper were talking, Leper revealed that the army was going to give him a Section Eight Discharge, which is worse than a Dishonorable Discharge. A Section Eight Discharge is, “... for the nuts in the service, the psychos, the Funny Farm candidates.” He continued on, and he told Gene that he was screwed for life because people would look at his resume and see that he got discharged from the army and nobody wants a crazy person working for them, they are a safety hazard for their customers. Then, Leper started insulting Gene about being
The quote, “Ignorance is bliss,” by Thomas Gray is a seemingly adequate description of the lives of Gene, Finny, and Leper until they are all roughly jolted out of their fantasy world and brought back to reality. In A Separate Peace, John Knowles does an acceptable job of showing how disillusionment can greatly impact and, thus, change the lives of people. The book showcases the cycle of disillusionment and the ramifications it implies. Throughout the book, we see Gene, Leper, and Finny’s views on the world change. This all culminates in Gene being elevated to a higher level of understanding of the world and seeing the truth about Devon and the war. The illusions created by Finny and Leper are also taken on by Gene, and he, in turn, shares in their disillusionment. Overall, disillusionment is a part of life and often serves as a tool to help many people grow and learn from the past.
Some blaming it on the prior generation’s political agendas. This loss of youth causes the destruction of what makes these soldiers people throughout the novel. One of the first quotes we begin to see Remarque delve into this “But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk” (18). Paul’s character feels as if they have aged and his youth is long gone and irretrievable that their minds will never be the same. This marks a death within themselves, to Paul and many other soldiers their former lives are in essence dead. They continuously tell themselves that they are no longer young men albeit their young age they truly feel as if their old men. This makes them feel as if they had their youth robbed from them because of the war. An earlier moment when Remarque visits this motif is “...Muller, who still carries his school textbooks with him, dreams of examinations ”(3). Muller still has not lost his ambition from his youth which is a stark contrast to his comrades to them their previous life is essentially nonexistent to the soldiers now. Muller nevertheless breaks this status quo of the soldiers by still studying with his books as he still dreams of one day returning and having a successful career. At this stage while the war has fully crushed the soldiers former selves and ambitions Muller’s hopes and dreams still stand strong.
Gene is able to adapt to the war after his war is finally over. Gene’s fear is finally gone after Finny has been hurt. “ … every trace of my fear of this forgotten” (Knowles 60). After Gene gets rid of his Finny he can now move on. His fear is gone and it allows him to adapt unlike Finny. In a scholarly journal it further explains how Gene is able to adapt so well compared to Finny. “Gene realizes that he’s ready for the war because he no longer feels any hatred. His war “ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.” He believes the real enemy is something he and the others have created out of their own fear” (Knowles 4). Gene finishes his war at Devon allowing him to move on to the real war. Other like Finny he can not adapt to the conditions and he can not get rid of his fear like Gene. Finny’s incapability to get rid of his fear leads to his death.
Jünger’s opening chapter recalls the enthusiastic first thoughts on entering the war, upon arrival in Champagne, “Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war .” Though the illusion was soon dispelled, throughout the novel Jünger did not seem to be phased by the reality of his mission. When Jünger described reaching Orainville, he wrote, “We saw only a few, ragged, shy civilians; everywhere eels soldiers in worn tattered tunics, with faces weather-beaten and often with a heavy growth of beard, strolling along at a slow pace, or standing in little clusters in doorways, watching our arrival with ribald remarks .” This is Jünger’s first of a pattern of acc...
The view the reader has of Leper is altered from him being farouche and peaceful to a deranged, senseless person. Even after this dramatic transformation, he still manages to keep his unique talent for being able to read deeper into matters of life. He is the one who is able to grasp Gene’s true “savageness” underneath, whereas Gene’s own best friend does not or chooses not to notice it. None can escape such icy tendrils, not Leper or any of his friends, so when one is touched by the virus known as war no one can stop the pain from
expressing individualism is elicited by Gene and Finny actions. Some ways the characters are forced to conform are by peer pressure, as evident in the excerpt,. In this citation, conformity is shown through Gene’s decision of complying with what Finny orders, due to peer pressure of jump off the tree, therefore nearly injuring himself. Furthermore, he realizes it wasn’t his culpability of being in that position, due to if Finny wasn't there none of this would have occurred. Even more, this led to Gene feeling a desire to assert his individualism, due to he feels that Finny has surpassed him in every way, and cause his failure, such as in his academics. As well, Phineas
The development of the war occurs with the maturing of Gene and most of his fellow students. The negative diction associated with the war revealed how Gene feared and even hated just the idea of war. In the end, however, he realized his own involvement in the war included no real warfare. As the war continues, Gene gives up on childlike activities like games and instead joins the war efforts. Through the setting of the Devon School, Knowles shows how war can reach even the most sheltered places. War molds our youth and thus molds our
Power, the perception of superiority over another human, is the source of many conflicts between people. Feeling inferior causes people to act beyond their normal personality. John Knowles strongly demonstrates this point in his work, A Separate Peace. In the relationship between Finny and Gene, Gene sets himself up to be inferior in the balance of power which motivates him to act irrationally to take power back from Finny.
Francis’s self consciousness drives him to join the army and begin his journey. As a child, he has always felt left out and independent from everyone else. “I’m rotten at everything.’ I confessed. ‘I can’t sing. I can’t dance. I’m no good at baseball.” And I can’t even get up the nerve to hold a normal conversation with Nicole Renard, I added silently,”(Cormier 56). Francis has always been a little self conscious of himself, causing him to hide and seem different than everyone else. This drives him to join the army in an attempt to kill himself.
In Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, Paul Baumer encounters many inner struggles. Through examining the changes occurring within himself, he finds he can no longer relate to his own past. His present thoughts and feelings are quite reclusive in nature and as he looks ahead, he finds himself fearing how the repercussions of the war will affect him in th...