Rossiter's ASP Blog 2020

In the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Gene reflects on his experience at Devon. He then realizes that he has already been through his own war. "I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there” (204). Throughout this novel, John Knowles has pushed the reader to see that Gene and Finny's relationship is complex. When Gene says, "My war ended before I ever put on a uniform" (204). He is talking about his internal war with his inner demons and his guilt with Finny. Now that Finny is dead, Gene considers Finny as an enemy. In the next line, Gene states, "Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone" (204). In this one sentence, John Knowles is saying that Finny never saw the bad side of people and never thought people could be evil. To Finny everyone was a friend, which is why h...

Finny changed the way Gene looks at the war, but he also changed his outlook on life. Finny sees the world in a very different way than Gene, which Gene adapted over time. Finny could go into his own world and believe it was real. When Gene says “Phineas alone had escaped this”, it’s true, that only Finny had really escaped the war. He never would have to go to war himself. He would never grow up to accept reality. Finny also escaped the war while he was still alive, by choosing not to believe in it. Once he finally accepts it, it’s still distant and irrelevant to his life. Even though none of the other boys had been to war yet, that hadn’t already escaped it as Finny had. They were always preparing for the war and talking about it. The other boys knew it was coming, but Finny never thought it would affect him. When Gene says “Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devcon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity.”, it shows how Finn...

In A Separate Peace, Gene discovers that Finny has been declared dead, “The marrow of the bone…” I repeated aimlessly. This at last penetrated my mind. Phineas had died from the marrow of his bone flowing down his blood stream to his heart,” (Knowles, 194). Although Gene is partially responsible for a lot that had happened to Finny, there are many other factors that play their part. Gene isn’t at fault for Finny’s death. Gene is as fault for Finny falling out of the tree, but he isn’t to blame for Finny’s last fall. As Finny was storming out of the Assembly Room, cursing Brinker out, he clumsily fell down the stairs. This fall was caused by Finny, and solely him. This was the fall that ultimately cost his life, and Gene was not the reason this occurred. In the end, there is no one to blame. Gene isn’t at fault because the first fall hadn’t put Finny’s life at risk. Even Finny isn’t to blame because he was emotionally distracted, and it might have been near-to-impossible to ...

In John Knowles's A Separate Peace , the moral of the story is maturity as a child to an adult. The two main characters in the novel, Gene and Finny, are portrayed perfectly by John Knowles as the average kid whose imagination rules out everyone else's world. Since the story is seen through Gene's eyes fifteen years later, the reader knows a lot more about him and his true feelings than Finny. When Gene impulsively made Finny lose balance and fall off a tree leading to his paralyzing injury, it had led to guilt and shame; but also made Gene more honest with Finny and changed the book's theme from innocence and childhood to adulthood and the real world. Gene states, "Phineas, you wouldn't be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg" (190). This quote shows how brutally honest Gene has become to Finny. John Knowles had always shown the reader that Finny was innocent but in chapter 12 Finny's true intention to be a brave, heroic soldi...

In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace , Finny reveals to Gene that ever since he came back to Devon, he has been writing letters in order to get drafted in the war. After he explains this, Gene retorts that “[you] wouldn’t be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg… you’d be over with the Germans or the Japs, asking if they’d like to field a baseball team against our side” (190).  A Separate Peace is a novel about coming of age, which we see Finny and Gene struggle with throughout the book. Gene is portrayed as an over-thinker, yet a realist about everything happening in the world outside of Devon, especially about the war. However, Finny is seen as stuck in his own fantasy world, unwilling to accept what is going on in the real world. Part of this fantasy includes Finny not accepting or understanding that there are evil people in the world who are capable of doing bad things. He believes that everyone in the world is good and that all conflict is ...

In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Gene receives the news that Finny is dead. After a moment of disbelief, and then grief, the narration quickly launches into an explanation to sum it up: “I did not cry then or ever about Finny.” Gene feels that he can't cry over Finny because “I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case” (194). After the tree incident, Gene attempted to tell Finny that the injury was his fault, but Finny refused to believe it and instead drew them both into a pretend world, where there were no ill feelings or mistrust between them. They formed a codependent relationship; Finny needed to live his sports fantasies through Gene, and Gene needed to do whatever Finny wanted in order to make him happy and therefore rid Gene of his guilt. However, living like this allowed Gene to escape his guilt only when he became Finny. When he’s working out, following Finny’s training plan, Gene notices that he forgets his ...