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A Separate Peace
John Knowles explores many themes in his novel, A Separate Peace; three of the most predominant themes throughout the novel are warfare, identity, and jealousy. Search for Identity-- Gene...
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A Separate Peace
Since the story is told by Gene, we tend to sympathize with him. People are most often the heroes of their own stories. However, Knowles also uses ominous description and dialogue in this scene to...
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A Separate Peace
One of the ways in which Knowles makes the reader sympathize with Gene is by having him caught off guard by the accusations levied against him. Although Gene has thus far been unable to admit to...
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A Separate Peace
It is in chapter 4 that Gene realizes just how competitive he truly is with Finny. After one of their escapades, Gene fails the first test he has ever failed. He re-commits himself to his studies,...
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A Separate Peace
The passage you're referring to reads as follows: So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and...
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A Separate Peace
One quote that shows Gene's conflict with himself occurs in the first chapter as he returns to Devon after an interval of 15 years. He writes of remembering his conflicted emotions of both fear and...
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A Separate Peace
At the end of John Knowles' novel A Separate Peace, Gene Forrester finds peace and redemption in the form of forgiveness from his friend Phineas. Mired in self-blame, jealousy, and regret, Gene...
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A Separate Peace
In the final chapter of A Separate Peace, Gene admits to having killed Phineas as he reflects upon World War II: I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the...
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A Separate Peace
The most important changed relationship in the novel is that between Gene, the novel's narrator, and his best friend, Phineas. As the novel opens, Gene is delighted to be chosen as the popular,...
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A Separate Peace
Leper is a minor character whose role in the novel is to show the boys at Devon the harsh realities of war. No young man wanted to get out of serving his country in WWII, and Leper joins up on an...
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A Separate Peace
The novel's title evokes several ideas about "peace" and the ways that it can separate or unite people. Because the book takes place during the World War II, the strong contrast of peace and war is...
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A Separate Peace
As Gene leaves the gym and walks across the fields for one last time as a new graduate of Devon School, the school is already being taken over by the military, the immediate future that is waiting...
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A Separate Peace
During the events leading up to Finny's accident in A Separate Peace, Gene's acute sense of competitiveness strains his relationship with his friend Finny. Gene feels that he consistently fails to...
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A Separate Peace
Brinker Hadley is the antithesis of Phineas, law-abiding and conservative in his views. When Finny leaves school for a while, Brinker moves into the position of leadership, but more as an...
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A Separate Peace
This prompt is potentially quite wide in its scope. A relatively simple way the book shows leadership is through the adult characters. It could be parents specifying certain rules and expectations...
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A Separate Peace
Gene, the narrator, sets the scene of his return with a long opening descriptive passage about Devon and the town around it. He has come back on his own, because, he states: There were a couple of...
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A Separate Peace
While not exactly an autobiographical book, A Separate Peace reflects John Knowles's high school years at the exclusive Philips Exeter Academy, a New England boarding school on which the novel's...
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A Separate Peace
Because the novel is set during World War II and is intrinsically connected to the war, historical allusions play a major role in the book. Historical allusions: In Chapter 2, Finny discusses the...
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A Separate Peace
Although Gene and Phineas are best friends, Gene hides his emotions because he doesn't trust the relationship due to its competitive nature. Gene is intimidated by Phineas because Finny is...
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A Separate Peace
Phil Latham wraps a blanket around Phineas because he has just tumbled down some stairs in the Assembly Hall corridor. The boys were putting on a mock trial about the day Phineas broke his leg...
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A Separate Peace
Before his accident, Finny had been a multi-sport natural athlete of the highest degree. While his successes came easily to him and he didn't like to make a show of his abilities, he did enjoy...
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A Separate Peace
The novel begins at Devon during the Summer Session of 1942 when Gene and Finny, along with the other members of their class, live lives that have not, as yet, been caught up in World War II....
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A Separate Peace
Peer pressure. Everyone else is jumping, so Gene does too, much to Finny's encouraging and persuasion. Gene, at this point in the novel, is easily influenced, and in some respects is still "finding...
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A Separate Peace
Gene has an explanation for this in Chapter 2. He says, Bombs were completely unreal to us here, not because we couldn't imagine it - a thousand newspaper photographs and newsreels had given us a...
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A Separate Peace
Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel entitled You Can't Go Home Again in which he writes of his main character that he learned through hardship that you can't go home to someone who will ease your burden and...
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A Separate Peace
In Chapter Five of John Knowles's A Separate Peace, the Summer Session has ended, a session in which some rules were suspended and forgotten and the atmosphere was more relaxed. Now it is the...
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A Separate Peace
As Gene and Brinker returned from working in the railyard, Brinker, completely disgusted with the oblivious attitude of Leper and the humor of shoveling snow while the war was raging, announced his...
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A Separate Peace
In John Knowles's A Separate Peace, the World War II setting parallels the personal and figurative war of Gene Forester. For, as Gene concludes at the end of the novel, ...it seemed clear that...
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A Separate Peace
One theme of John Knowles's A Separate Peace is that of Guilt and Innocence. As Knowles himself wrote, after Finny's crippling accident, everything that follows is one long abject confession, a...
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A Separate Peace
Gene returns to Devon in the fall fifteen years after he graduated. Autumn usually signifies age, or the process of aging, which also connects to the time since he's been at the school. As people...
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A Separate Peace
Jealousy seems to be a mix of low self-esteem plus envy; it's mainly about perception from those two weak points of view, too. If a person obsesses over these feelings for too long, there are sure...
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A Separate Peace
In the novel A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, Gene and Finny experience many life altering experiences, not only because of the rivalry between the two boys, but also because World War II is on...
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A Separate Peace
Well, the best way to answer this question is to read the book. I think you'll find some unexpected revelations as you read. But I'll help you get started. The conflict centers around two friends...
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A Separate Peace
In reality, Finny had always known that there was a war, he was just playing an elaborate denial game with himself, in order to deal with not being accepted into it. Not being accepted into the...
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A Separate Peace
Gene wants to become the top student in his class. Gene feels that he is in indirect competition with Finny. Achieving academic success is his most logical and likely way to attain some kind of...
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A Separate Peace
The night that Brinker and three others come to Gene and Finny's room to "take them out" in prelude to the trial in the First Academy Building, Gene is helping Finny with his Latin. Gene works to...
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A Separate Peace
In A Separate Peace, John Knowles uses a significant number of weather references to help set the mood. Some examples include: Chapter 1: When Gene returns to Devon the weather is dark and bleak....
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A Separate Peace
In Chapter 11 of A Separate Peace, Brinker Hadley seeks the facts of the circumstances surrounding Finny's accident because he suspects Gene Forrester of foul play. Gene returns to Devon after...
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A Separate Peace
Finny seems almost impervious to fear throughout most of the novel. But, if we look closely at a couple incidents and passages, we can see a couple of his fears surfacing. The main thing that...
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A Separate Peace
The central symbol of nature in the novel is the tree, which provides a place for the boys to come together and enjoy fellowship. This is one of the reasons that the injury that occurs during one...
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A Separate Peace
Gene Forrester's inner conflict is evident when he returns to Devon School, where his first battles began. For he realizes that his private evil is the same evil that begins wars and he was on...
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A Separate Peace
At times through the course of A Separate Peace, Gene is completely content to be Finny's best friend and to follow wherever Finny leads; at other times, Gene feels insecure and competitive about...
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A Separate Peace
When Gene speaks to the doctor following the surgery, the doctor tells him that Finny's leg had sustained "a messy break," and that although he will walk again, he will never be able to play sports...
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A Separate Peace
In Chapter 11 of A Separate Peace, Gene has taped pictures which create the illusion of his having come from the gentry of the South: plantation mansions, old trees with Spanish moss hanging from...
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A Separate Peace
In John Knowles' A Separate Peace, Gene responds to his best friend's admission that he wants to be a part of the war by comforting him. Gene, however, comforts Finny in a way that only a best...
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A Separate Peace
The author's depiction of Saturday as "battleship gray" is highly symbolic. On a literal level, it is late winter, and the sky is, in fact, a deep, dull, overpowering gray color. Symbolically,...
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A Separate Peace
You unfortunately don't specify the end of which chapter you are referring to. There are two endings however that could be applicable to what you are stating. The first is the end of Chapter 2...
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A Separate Peace
You are correct; Leper is a dynamic character. In your answer you want to make a clear distinction on how Leper changed. When Leper is first introduced, he is a nature loving, laid back person....
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A Separate Peace
I would say the larger of the two internal conflicts that Gene has and has to cover up with a lie is the conflict about whether or not he bounced the branch and knocked Finny off it. Yes, Gene did...
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A Separate Peace
Leper's evasion was psychological while Finny's was physical. Neither boy could really help what happened to him, though, because it was neither one of their faults. Leper didn't plan to have a...
