Symbols 'By James Ellis' A Separate Peace: Literary Criticism

903 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Theme of rivalry in a separate peace

In the evident literary criticism, “Interconnected Symbols” by James Ellis, Ellis explicitly explains that the concept of the novel, A Separate Peace, has numerous symbols that correspond with one another. When reading the novel, the basic understanding of the story is the friendship that Finny and Gene share with each other. Ellis, on the other hand strips the level of meanings by finding the move of innocence to the infatuation of brotherhood and betrayal, with three different aspects of interconnected symbols. These include: summer and winter, the Devon River and the Naguamsett River, and peace and war; each one supporting one another. Ellis also includes the tree, Gene’s envy, Gene’s regeneration, a make believe war, and Gene’s understanding …show more content…

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

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of A Separate Peace By John Knowles

    796 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Phineas 'Coming Of Age In John Knowles' A Separate Peace

    651 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Water In John Knowles 'A Separate Peace'

    449 Words  | 1 Pages

    In A Separate Peace, author John Knowles uses the element of water to portray hidden meanings throughout the story. Although the weather is part of the setting, the rain, snow, and fog also reveal a character’s inner thoughts and what they are experiencing. Sometimes, when characters are showing effusive emotion, authors let “a character to cleansed, symbolically,” (Foster 77) by letting him walk through the rain. This causes them to be “less angry, less confused, and more repentant” (Foster 77). In A Separate Peace, Gene revisits his old school, Devon, after his time in the war. He ventures to the tree in which he pushed off his best friend, and rain begins to pour. Being cleansed in the rain, he realizes, “nothing endures, not a tree, not

    Read More

  • Character Analysis: Summer At Devon

    822 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gene understands that Finny is unable to make a transition into adulthood when he says, “You’d get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight anymore. You’d make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war” (191). Finny is unable to make an enemy out of anyone therefore preventing him from finding any real internal war to fight. Gene is already experiencing a mental and emotional battle from Finny’s fall allowing him to enter adulthood. Childhood can not thrive forever, adults cannot carry the careless characteristics of a small boy, and this is why Phineas can never made it to adulthood; he can never fully reveal an internal fight with true emotion behind it. Gene is shattered to the doctor say, “‘This is something I think boys of your generation are going to see a lot of,’ he said quietly, ‘and I will have to tell you about it now. Your friend is dead.’ He was incomprehensible” (193). Nevertheless, this marks the end of Gene’s war and grants him entrance into adulthood. Phineas’ death is the true mark that one can not be a child forever, they must find a fight inside their head that requires emotional and intellectual strength to become an

    Read More

  • A Separate Peace Hero's Journey Essay

    802 Words  | 2 Pages

    When Gene makes Finny fall from the tree can be identified as the ordeal because it makes Gene work harder in his studies or sports since it is not only for himself, but for the friend he nearly killed, “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb.” (Knowles 28). This represents the beginning of the challenges because Gene is faced with the burden of carrying not only his work but with living his life for Finny since he took that chance from him. Gene soon begins the road back to his journey with his new found burden as Finny denies that Gene intentionally made him fall off the tree, “‘Finny, I tried to tell you before, I tried to tell you when I came to Boston that

    Read More

  • Knowles' Separate Peace Essays: Loss of Innocence

    765 Words  | 2 Pages

    Setting expatiates the theme of loss of innocence.  For example, the four major characters in this story are sixteen and seventeen years old, which is the age when teenagers prepare to end their childhood and become adults.  Also, the Devon school, where the story takes place, is a place where boys make the transition to full adulthood, and so this setting shows more clearly the boys' own growth.  Finally, World War II, which in 1942 is raging in Europe, forces these teenage boys to grow up fast; during their seventeenth year they must evaluate everything that the war means to them and decide whether to take an active ...

    Read More

  • Symbols in A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

    592 Words  | 2 Pages

    The theme “rite of passage” was used in the novel A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. This moving from innocence to adulthood was contained within three sets of interconnected symbols: summer and winter, the Devon and Naguamsett Rivers, and peace and war. These symbols served as a backdrop upon which the novel was developed. The loss if Gene Forrester’s innocence was examined through these motifs.

    Read More

  • The Importance of Individuality in John Knowles' A Separate Peace

    877 Words  | 2 Pages

    "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.

    Read More

  • A Separate Peace

    659 Words  | 2 Pages

    Symbolism is also very important to this novel. An example of this is the war; it symbolizes several different things. Finny explains to the head master that “We’re all

    Read More

  • Rivalry In A Separate Peace

    1545 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

    1215 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Sound and the Fury and The Crying of Lot 49

    2400 Words  | 5 Pages

    ...ntence. Some critics read the title of Faulkner's novel as a challenge to the reader, in that, as "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing," the book defies traditional literary understanding. Faulkner ends the novel with Benjy howling, fulfilling the line from "Macbeth," but after that has an image of order. The form of narrative, and not the content of life, is the only chance for order in the world. A new framing device of literary technique replaces the conventional teleological frame. The novel moves from Good Friday to Easter, from the innocence of Benjy's opening section to the omniscience of Faulkner's (or Dilsey's) concluding section. While Perry Mason and Benjy's howl seemingly signify nothing, the precision of authorial control reveals the deep material of the past in each novel from which we can attribute meaning.

    Read More

  • A Separate Peace - Symbolism

    1599 Words  | 4 Pages

    Another of the principal themes in this novel is the theme of maturity. The two rivers that are part of the Devon School property symbolize how Gene and Finny grow up through the course of the novel. The Devon River is preferred by the students because it is above the dam and contains clean water. It is a symbol of childhood and innocence because it is safe and simple. It is preferred which shows how the boys choose to hold onto their youth instead of growing up. The Naguamsett is the disgustingly dirty river which symbolizes adulthood because of its complexity. The two rivers intermingle showing the boys’ changes from immature individuals to slightly older and wiser men.

    Read More

  • The Fall of Innocence in A Separate Peace

    997 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud, It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear forgotten.” (Knowles 59-60). Gene Forrester, one of the main characters in John Knowles' novel A Separate Peace, describes his best friend Phineas' fall from a “tremendous tree, an irate steely black steeple beside a river,”(Knowles 6) at their all boys boarding school, Devon. Gene is an introverted young boy who is very academically gifted. Finny, however, is an extremely extroverted childish young boy who is very athleticaly gifted. Finny's fall eventually leads to terrible things, such as death and guilt. Throughout the novel Knowles uses Phineas' fall from the tree to symbolize his loss of innocence, to show Gene's guilt, and to develop Phinea's death.

    Read More

  • Analysis of The Birth Mark

    1161 Words  | 3 Pages

    In “The Birthmark” the relationships and behaviors of the character reveal much more than the story itself does. The characters of Aylmer, Georgian, Amenidab and Nature itself, through their words, actions, and behaviors give insight into a much more meaningful story. A deeper analysis of the characters reveals that they are archetypes, and as archetypes they provide a deeper hidden meaning to the story. By looking at Aylmer, Georgiana, Amenidab and Natures relationships and actions throughout the story we can see how they are used to give deeper significance.

    Read More

More about Symbols 'By James Ellis' A Separate Peace: Literary Criticism

Open Document