Yet less anxious does not mean good. At the conclusion of A Separate Peace— when Finny finally asks Forrester why he caused the fall—Forrester replies that he did not do it out of any personal hatred of Finny. Instead, Forrester is fighting himself—out of blindness and ignorance, as he himself admits—and Finny ultimately understands, before he dies, how he has been victimized by Forrester’s own psychological conflict. Essentially, then, Finny is simply an object (albeit a very important object) playing a part in Forrester’s personal battles. The finishing touch to Knowles’s psychological study occurs with Finny’s burial, when Forrester cannot cry because he has the feeling that part of himself is being buried with his friend. Thus, when Forrester eventually enlists and goes off to World War II, he does so without any genuine animosity. He has symbolically killed the enemy inside himself, and so he has no further need to find another person to symbolize his dark interior self.