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Senior year draws to a somber close. The war comes full-fledged into Devon in the person of troops from Parachute Riggers\' school, who take over the Far Common.
Finny\'s death draws Brinker and Gene closer together. It makes sense; Finny had been like a buffer zone, a barrier between the two boys. Brinker did what he had to do, in the spirit of partial ignorance and irresponsibility, and we have a hard time blaming him now. The two are drawn together on common ground as survivors, without Leper, without Finny.
Brinker\'s father, visiting the campus, represents the old guard, an earlier generation that has already fought its war and now looks forward with gung ho enthusiasm to seeing the new wave take over. \"Times change, and wars change. But men don\'t change, do they?\" Mr. Hadley asks. Apparently they do, for Gene and Brinker have no intention of being engaged in what Mr. Hadley calls \"the real fighting\" if they can help it. Gene is off to the Navy in Pensacola, Brinker to the Coast Guard.
Brinker\'s focus on the war is narrower than Gene\'s. He sees it as one generation\'s bad legacy to the next, handed down through history, a contagious epidemic to be suffered by mankind forever. Brinker feels victimized by his father\'s generation and the mistakes they made, which will force Brinker and his friends to disrupt their lives for no apparent good reason.
Gene, however, has a far more intimate and philosophical perspective, as we have come to expect of him. \"Wars were made instead,\" Gene tells us, not Brinker, who would probably not understand, \"by something ignorant in the human heart.\" As usual, Gene finds the middle ground between Finny\'s sense of absurdity or fantasy and Brinker\'s extreme realism. Gene is the compromiser. That\'s why he is the character narrating the story and walking the delicate tightrope.
Finny, always on Gene\'s mind, in death as he was in life, is Gene\'s touchstone, the standard by which he measures everyone and everything. Finny is his ideal, to such an extent that although Gene admires Finny so highly, we\'ve never believed he could become all that much like him. Perhaps the trait in Gene that Finny came to admire in the end was his sheer individuality.
Gene\'s humility endears him to us. He has found a way to present a fully fleshed portrait of Finny as a hero, a portrait so well drawn that his greatness stays with us long after we have closed the book.
NOTE: Reflect on the differences between the Gene we met at the beginning of the novel and the Gene we\'re listening to now, in the aftermath of Finny\'s death. He has changed. His constant exposure to Finny, the ordeal of having had to work out a way of communicating with him, has drawn him out. We admired Finny from the outset; now, in the end, we admire Gene for having the self-knowledge to benefit so deeply from Finny\'s presence.
\"My schooling was over now,\" the solitary Gene tells us as he winds his way through Devon, cleaning out his locker (we think of Finny whenever sports enter the picture) and then aimlessly following the troops on to the playing fields to watch their calisthenics from a safe distance. By \"schooling,\" we know, he means far more than academic subjects and book learning. Gene is \"ready for the war\" because, ironically, he has nothing to fight for; he is not concerned with such abstractions as freedom, justice, and the American way of life. This is not to say that the will to struggle and survive has gone out of him, but that he has already made his personal gesture of anger toward the world--on that day a year ago--when he jounced the tree limb. And his gesture was just as absurd as one nation\'s pitting itself against another and sacrificing the lives of young men in the process.
Gene seems to be trying to work out in his mind what it was ultimately that was Finny\'s distinguishing characteristic. What was it that made him different from everyone else? Perhaps it was his utter lack of defensiveness, his supreme faith, that prevented him from ever hating anyone. Finny was never consciously on the lookout for himself, he seemed to know he was exempt from harm--except for that one inexplicable action by someone he trusted. Is it a failing to believe you are somehow protected from experience? Does this trait go against the grain of human nature to such a degree that it cannot be allowed to persist in someone\'s character?
...the real importance of Mr. Knowles\'s novel does indeed lie in its account of the attempt, made by two powerless individuals, to dissociate themselves from them [Roosevelt, Churchill, the \"old men\" leaders of war, and authority in general] and the follies for which they are responsible.... But Mr. Knowles makes it plain enough (even if we hadn\'t guessed already) that quiet common sense is a feeble match for reality and the Generals: they are sure of the last word.
-Simon Raven, \"No Time for War,\" 1959
Mr. Knowles\'s world is the real world where black-and-white character contrasts rarely lie conveniently to hand. Gene and Finny can slip in and out of each other\'s roles and yet remain entirely themselves while doing so. Their relationship has that subtle elusiveness which is entirely human and which novelists, with good reason, find desperately difficult to convey.
-\"School Reports,\" in Times Literary Supplement, 1959, p. 262
Knowles\' schoolboy must face the discovery of hatred--a bitter and homicidal knot of hatred in himself.... One of the things the novelist seems to be saying is that the enemy Gene killed, and loved, is the one every man must kill: his own youth, the innocence that burns too hotly to be endured.
-\"The Leap,\" in Time magazine, 1960
...if, as the book shows, Finny is unfit for war, it is because of his fundamental innocence or idealism--his regard for the world not as it is, but as it should be--that renders him unfit.... In Finny\'s fall from the tree, Gene has violated, or rather surrendered, his innocence, and he learns that any attempt to regain it, to \'become a part of Phineas\'... is at best a transient experience, at worst a gesture of despair.
-Jay L. Halio, \"John Knowles\'s Short Novels,\" 1960
Unlike his friends who had sought through some building of defenses to ward off the inevitability of evil, Gene has come to see that his enemy never comes from without, but always from within. He knows, moreover, that there is no defense to be built, only an acceptance and purification of oneself through love. Such a love did he share with a Phineas in a private gypsy summer. And it is because of the purity of this love that he is able to survive his fall from innocence.
-James Ellis, \"A Separate Peace: The Fall from
Innocence,\" 1964.
Although the war touches Devon school only slightly--one of the joys of the summer session is that it seems totally removed from the world of war--it cannot be forgotten or ignored for long; it exists not only as an event that stands between the experience of the novel and Gene\'s telling, but as an event that, at the very moment of the experience, dominates the life of each character.\"
-Ronald Weber, \"Narrative Method in A Separate Peace,\" 1965
Good and evil, love and hate, involvement and isolation, self and selflessness are not always clearly defined nor their values constant [in A Separate Peace]. Part of growing up is the recognition that the human condition is a dappled one, that the wrong we feel in things is often only some pattern erected by fear and ignorance, some rigidity that divides life into lifeless compartments.
-Paul Witherington, \"A Separate Peace:
A Study in Structural Ambiguity,\" 1965
A Separate Peace deals with culture, and with the sensibility of the individual as it is formed by a particular culture.... Knowles draws the reader\'s attention to the individual\'s efforts to adjust to cultural change, and to the quality of his moral responses as he attempts to cope with the disruption of his formerly stable world.
-James L. McDonald, \"The Novels of John Knowles,\" 1967
...there is more goodness in Gene than he knows. Phineas, in his need, gives Gene the opportunity to do good and unknowingly gives Gene the self-confidence to be free once more. For Gene\'s act had damaged Phineas\' athletic excellence and, worse, threatened the basis for Phineas\' humanity; and Phineas uses his remaining days to deny this loss. He proceeds to recreate his world through Gene\'s friendship and athletic development. In this experience, Gene, freed now of envy and despair, understands himself and Phineas.
-Fraziska Lynne Greiling, \"The Theme of
Freedom in A Separate Peace,\" 1967
[Gene\'s] return to Devon in his early thirties and his memoir of Devon\'s 1942-43 academic year prove that his private struggle has outlasted the public holocaust of World War II. Just as the anvil can break the hammer, the tree incident hurts Gene more than it does Finny. The novel turns on the irony that the separate peace mentioned in its title excludes its most vivid presence--its narrator.
-Peter Wolfe, \"The Impact of Knowles\'s
A Separate Peace,\" 1970
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