A Separate Peace

The two main characters of John Knowles novel, A Separate Peace, are best friends.  Their names are Gene and Finny.  Gene is the quiet smart one while Finny is much more outgoing and athletic.  Their differences are obvious as the narrator takes much of the book trying to explain them and what they caused.  As great of friends as the two are, there is something evil between them, something Finny is oblivious too, as he has far too much love for his friend.  Gene knows there is something growing in their relationship, but he cannot accept or name it. 

This something is born and raised in the secret thoughts of Gene’s mind.  These very thoughts center around Finny ranging from love, to jealousy, to rage.  Gene adores Finny, as he is proud to have him as his best friend, but deep, deep down he hates him.  Gene is jealous of the human marvel that Finny is.  He hates the hold that Finny has over him, able to bring Gene along on any random adventure that Finny thinks up.  Gene despises this hold, but at first he doesn’t know it.  He thinks that Finny and he are best friends and this is just how things go, this is how they play out for him.  He’s proud that someone as great as Finny has selected him, out of the many, to be his closest friend, his partner for the summer of 1938.  Deep down, a rage is growing in Gene.  A rage brought on by a desire of all Finny has and all he is able to do. 

That is why Gene causes Finny to fall from the tree.  When first reading that sentence, I never believed it had actually happened.  I reread the paragraph over and over again until finally I understood that Gene had truly allowed to his friend Gene to fall from the tree.  To me, he does this because he can never be like Finny.  Never able to be as spontaneous or physically capable as Finny, so Knowles decided that Gene will just take these things away from him, because as his talents are taken so are his unique emotions.  Gene ruins his best friend Finny. 

Could Finny have pushed Gene too far? Could he have been too cocky, shown off too much, and dragged Gene along on too many adventures.  No.  Plain and simple fault could never be Finny’s.  No one is deserving of that kind of fall, one that could even have killed them depending on how they landed.  Gene commits an act of evil, but I don’t think that he is actually evil.  In an extreme moment of weakness he allows is jealousy to over take him.  Gene is no terrorist or professional killer, he may have even thought Finny would have been fine.  Seeing that Finny is so talented and wonderful, he may have thought that Finny would have bounced right off the shallow pond shore.  This didn’t happen though, one of his legs is shattered completely.  Four thousand miles away from war, a young boy makes a decision just as life threatening as the American soldiers fighting for his sake.  Maybe Knowles was just trying to show how evil and corrupting was is.  That men of war make decisions equal in evil to that of Gene’s choice.