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John Knowles’s A Separate Peace is a novel about violence and rancor even though Gene, its protagonist, never actually faces battle. The book begins as news of World War II sweeps over Gene and his best friend, Finny, infiltrating their final summer term and academic year at the Devon School. Despite the constant presence of the war, though ...
- Change and Growing Up
John Knowles’s A Separate Peace is a story about the ways in...
- Identity
A Separate Peace showcases the process of identity...
- Fall (Autumn) and Finny's Fall
Finny ’s fall from the tree and the seasonal transition from...
- Change and Growing Up
As the story goes on, the war will affect them more and more directly. “No maids,” I said. “After all, there’s a war on. It’s not much of a sacrifice, when you think of people starving and being bombed and all the other things.”. My unselfishness was responding properly to the influences of 1942. Gene explains to the newly returned ...
The novel explores the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, with the conflicts and horrors of World War II lurking symbolically in the background. Knowledge of the war’s unsettling events infects many images and scenes in the novel, encroaching on the illusory “separate peace” of life at the Devon School in New Hampshire.
978-0-7432-5397-0. A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age novel by John Knowles, published in 1958. Based on his earlier short story "Phineas", published in the May 1956 issue of Cosmopolitan, it was Knowles's first published novel and became his best-known work. Set against the backdrop of World War II, A Separate Peace explores morality ...
- John Knowles, Deane O. Bogardus
- 1959
Set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes ...
- (223.5K)
- Paperback
A Separate Peace takes place during wartime and is emphatically a novel about war—and yet not a single shot is fired in the course of the story, no one dies in battle, and only the unfortunate Leper even joins the military before graduation. Instead, Knowles focuses on the war within the human heart, a war that is affected by the events of World War II but exists independently of any real ...
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Aug 14, 2014 · The war rages off-stage, dimly viewed through newspaper stories, but Devon maintains a luminous innocence – embodied in the novel's most vivid character, Phineas, or Finny, an open-hearted ...
