“Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.”

This goes to express that noting cultivated by the human mind can last forever.  No feelings can, anyway.  Trees die eventually, are even the most violent deaths are eventually lost in both history and living memory.  Though there are countless sayings that state the exact opposite, even love is not eternal.  The fact is that even if it was, human nature rarely allows any feelings, especially those of tenderness, to prevail because of primal instincts.  Those who loved were once considered weak, just as they are in the military today.  Survival of the fittest does not really come into play anymore in first world countries where we’re writing these blogs, so love and other “weaknesses” are just things that were never allowed to evolve into things that the true nature of humans let pass.  Love is a weakness, and always will be.  Love cannot always prevail or the universe would never balance out.

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive”

It is in the nature of almost all humans, the exception being realists and pessimists, to try and see the best in situation in order to better cope with whatever hardships they face and to not go insane.  It obviously is ineffective in the case of Leper, but hey.  We can’t all be winners.  My point is that people naturally try to convince themselves that everything will be okay because we don’t want to feel weak or vulnerable by coming to terms with the facts that say everything most likely will be fine in the end.  Honestly, it almost never is.  Leper is an extreme example of what an happen when one’s nature betrays them and causes one to be blind to the truth.

“Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody”

This shows how much people honestly need someone, anyone, to be able to rely on and become close to.  The family complex is still very strongly present in the hard-wiring of the human mind.  Finny needs to believe in Gene because he is the only one around with whom Finny is close.  People can not be alone or they, naturally, become unstable and sometimes very tortured.  Like in the movie “Cast Away,” when Tom hanks’ character creates a friend out of a volleyball, humans naturally strive to have a family that they can bond with due to the ancient need for survival through strength in numbers.  Finny feels that Gene is his family and is desperate to have someone that really understands him on a deeper level because without Gene, Finny would only have his superficial followers like Brinker.

Leper is the character that I think changes the most.  Basically, he goes nuts.  Usually, Leper is quiet and particularly eccentric for a boy of his age.  He enjoys nature and skiing rather than sports and socializing, but this may be because he is an outcast among his friends because he has slightly different tastes and interests.  Due to being socially isolated to a point, Leper decides to enlist in the ski troops, making him the first of the boys at Devon to join a branch of the military.  He does this, I think, to feel like he is important, serves a purpose, and is evolved.  Leper cannot handle the stress of service, however, and goes completely insane.  He goes AWOL after he realizes that he will be served with a section 8 discharge, dishonorable to say the least.  If this happens, he will not be able to get a job anywhere, so Leper goes home to Vermont.  I think this is a pretty significant change myself, so there you go.

Gene Forrester and Phineas, or Finny (whom remains without a last name), Brinker Hadley, and Elwin “Leper” Lepellier are the main characters in this novel. The boys all play an important part in the setting of the novel and the overall plot and storyline themselves.

Gene Forrester is what could only be closely described by terms like dweeb, geek, or nerd.  He is studious to the point of perfection and academic success.  He envies the carefree nature of his roommate Finny, whose antics and lack of appreciation for learning somehow cause Gene to develop a slight obsession despite his frustration at him.

Phineas is your average, stereotypical all-American-boy of the eras between 1930 and 1970-ish.  He is extremely adept in sports of all varieties, even coming up with his own on occasion.  He has broken school records and won several athletic awards, but lacks greatly the academic ability of his roommate, Gene.  Finny’s freewheeling nature also prohibits him from accepting the fact that ht e world is at war, though we learn that this is also partly because he was not accepted into any branches of the military, thus injuring his pride.  Oh, also: He dies.

Elwin “Leper” Lepellier is a friend of both Gene and Finny, despite being immensely outcast from his peers most of the time.  Leper is interested in nature and skiing, which may be why he is so excluded by the other students at Devon.  Leper is the first of the Devon boys to enlist in the military, much to the disdain of Brinker Hadley.  Leper, shortly after enlisting, goes insane due to the stress of the military and makes the decision to go AWOL rather than receiving a section 8 discharge that will lable him as insane and keep him from getting a job anywhere in the future.

Brinker Hadley is the main antagonist in the novel, apart from Gene himself.  Brinker strives ceaselessly during the winter session to achieve peace and order at school, but eventually gives up after he becomes depressed when Leper is the first to enlist in the military.  Brinker attempts to blame Gene for Finny’s accident and even goes so far as to hold a mock-trial in order to officially put the responsibility on Gene.  He and Gene later reconcile.

The title of A Separate Peace is probably the most intricate and confusing aspect of the whole novel.  It can be looked at from several different perspectives, only a couple of which I will address in this post.  The first view on the title that I’d like to examine is the piece of the boys-of-Devon puzzle that Gene represents.  Gene is studious and pretty careful most of the time, traits that are slightly different from those among his other friends at school, especially Finny.  His caution acts to separate Gene as bit from his friends, hence the puzzle piece idea.  Another possible meaning of the title is the peace that Gene gains at the end of the novel.  While his childhood best friend was still dead and he was still experiencing a great amount of guilt, Gene’s return o the school allows him to gain insight into what really happened to him.  While I doubt that Gene actually stayed in touch with people like Leper and Brinker, I do believe that they were all still intertwined with each other in adulthood because of their experiences.  This is exactly what makes the title significant.  Although the boys would always be a part of each other, one can assume that all of them but Gene got over Finny’s death within a year or so because they were not experiencing the guilt that Gene was.  The only way that Gene could come to terms with what he did, could finally have peace, was completely different then what I think the other boys did, which was most likely mourn Finny for the appropriate amount of time and then try to forget their feelings as young people will do.

This novel is set originally in 1958 New Hampshire at an all-boys military academy called the Devon school.  In the first few pages, however, the author transitions from the set time to World War II, namely the years 1941-43.  The author does so by creating a flashback by the narrator and main character, Gene, through which the rest of the story is told until the last few pages of the novel.  Throughout this text, the setting varies slightly between New England states, but is mostly centered on the Devon school itself and the town surrounding it.  The school and surrounding grounds include fields for sports such as lacrosse, soccer, and football, as well as tennis courts, wooded areas, and several thin lakes and rivers.  One outstanding characteristic of the school’s setting, though, is a very large, very old tree.  This tree is found overhanging the Devon River and plays an integral part of the emotional and dramatic settings of the novel.  I definitely think that this could happen today.  I’m sure there are countless numbers of uppity, prep. schools founded on arrogance that just happen to be inhabited by rule-breaking adolescent boys.  I do not, however, think that there are many of these schools that host trees that can be called accomplices to manslaughter.

 “He (Finny) never had been jealous of me for a second.  Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.”                

I chose this quote because I think that it is a defining moment for Gene.  This is when Gene realizes that he is of much lesser quality than Finny and becomes ashamed of himself.  This is also the moment that Gene begins to morph into the kind of  “Hyde” character that he becomes, a morose shell of his previous self, and the readers are able to see that Gene is the real antagonist, not Finny.

 “I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”

This quote was significant to me because I felt that it was a direct manifestation of the overall theme for the entirety of the book’s first half.  Gene would always strive to be just like Finny, whether or not he did it intentionally, and I believe that this is a point that it is easy to see just how utterly obsessed with his ideology Gene actually is.

   “Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It’s all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you’ve got to be in a hurry. And when you’re in a war you’ve got to be in a hurry.”

This quote is one that i really like because i think that this is the last thing that leper says before he goes insane and I also feel that this misconstrued image of the ski troops is what causes leper to have his issues later.  Had he stayed true to his mild-mannered, nature-loving character, he wouldn’t have been so whack-a-doodle.

“He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity.”

This is a quote that describes Finny perfectly.  I mean, to-a-tee.  Finny was the most confident and outgoing character in the book, by far, but he was not arrogant.  His world was just a purity.  His happiness was incorruptibly blissful, for a while, anyway.

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . .”

When leper says this, it is obviously ominous to those whom have previously read the book, but not those who are in the process   I think this is rather ironic.  Leper literally does the exact opposite of what he says.  He literally devolves into a psychotic weirdo.

“Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers, but I do believe-it’s important for me to believe you.”

This is a quote I chose simply because it makes me want to cry.  It’s just so depressing that, even after Finny says this, gene continues to be a jerk-wad.  I must feel really bad for Finny.  Poor kid…

 “Your war memories will be with you forever,”

This quote is ridiculously ironic.  The war was not even what Gene really remembered, but the war within himself that eventually killed his best friend.  Gene could not care less about the war, but his experience and immense guilt with Finny is something that will never leave him.

“Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.”

This is significant because while the boys were stuck shoveling snow, they were also trapped in their own adolescence.  Some of them wanted to be out in the actual world, and some simply wanted to forget the war all together.  The fact that they were children restricted the boys from doing as they wished with their lives, as it continues to do today in society.

“I should have told him then that he was my best friend also…But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”

This quote helps illustrate Gene’s insecurity and awkwardness.  Not only is he extremely conscious of what his other friends would say if he expressed emotion towards Finny, but I believe that he also does not exactly know how to express intimate emotions.  Oh, also, he’s crazy.

“You always were a savage underneath…like that time when you knocked Finny out of the tree.”

I think that this goes to show just exactly how flipping CRAY Leper got towards the end of the book.  He was originally a mild-mannered, quiet boy who was content with just his nature and skiing until he went off to war.  Leper then became insane and proved this by blackmailing Gene.