Aayushree Pradhan Essays - Phillips Exeter Academy, A Separate Peace

Aayushree Pradhan English 3 26 May 2017 Friendship, rivalry, - or more? There are a lot of themes in John Knowles novel, A Separate Peace, but one of the most important and significant themes is friendship. A friend is a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection. A Separate Peace examines conflicts between two once close friends - Gene Forrester and Phineas. Gene is really good at studies while Finny is really good at athletics. They are close friends at the beginning of the story, but the connection between them becomes broken as Gene started to doubt Finny. At times, Gene and Finny are the best of friends, sharing their feelings with each other and going to places with each other, but at other times, Gene sees Finny as a rival and thinks he is trying to stop Gene from achieving academic success. Because of Gene's insecurity and misunderstanding, the friendly relationship between Gene and Finny changes and morphs into something evil. As the story progresses, Gene starts to grow envious of Finny's athletic ability, and believes that Finny is jealous of Gene's academic skill because Finny himself isn't very good at it. He suspects that Finny is trying to stop him from succeeding academically and his envy soon grows to blatant hatred. He says that he "couldn't help envying him" and that it was "perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little" (25). When Gene fails a test after an "illegal" trip to the beach with Finny, Gene starts to think that Finny is trying to sabotage his academic accomplishments. He claims that "Finny had deliberately set out to wreck (his) studies We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all" (53). However, Finny does not have any unfriendly feelings toward Gene, and constantly reassures Gene that Gene is his "best pal" (48). Gene tries to reciprocate Finny's feelings but claims that "that level of feeling, deeper tha n thought" (48) held him back. Nevertheless, Gene proceeds to jostle the limb of the tree and causes Finny to break his leg, and with it, his athletic career. By doing this, Gene is not acting like an affectionate "friend" at all. As we go through the story, we realize that the seemingly vanilla and perfect friendship between the two is slowly falling apart - even to the point of tragedy. Although Gene's assumption of Finny as a rival is incorrect, this marked the start of a massive internal conflict in Gene. Gene no longer trusted anything Finny did, and began to foster hostile thoughts toward him. For example, after Finny accuses Gene of trying to beat Chet Douglass and becompe the valedictorian, Gene thinks of it as "all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it was all enmity" (53). Also, it is clear that Finny is somewhat aware of Gene's thoughts. For example, he kind of knew that Gene had jostled the branch, but could not bring himself to admit it, let alone accuse Gene of doin g anything. He even goes to extreme measures to make sure that this truth does not come out when he says that he will "kill (Gene) if (he) doesn't shut up" (70). Gene on the other hand, takes this literally as a sign of rivalry and retorts with a brazen "You see! Kill me! Now you know what it is!" (70). Later on in the story, when Brinker holds a mock trial to find out what exactly happened in the tree that day, Phineas refuses to accept the truth and destroy the "friendship" between him and Gene. Instead, he runs out of the courtroom in tears and topples down the hard, marble stairs, and breaks his already broken leg. In the beginning, Gene and Finny both seem to be nice, good people at heart. When Finny is first introduced to Gene as his roommate, the air between them is friendly. However as the story develops, Gene goes from being friendly and nice to unstable and hateful. The friendship between him and Finny starts to become strained and Gene falls so deep into his pit of