A Separate Peace discussion

1) The novel, A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, is haunted by a dark and serious tone to emphasize its meaning and plot. It begins as a flashback taken from its protagonist, Gene, as he looks back on his time spent at Devon in the summer session of 1942. In A Separate Peace, the author, John Knowles uses rhetorical devices such as foreshadowing, simile, and imagery, to enhance its dark and somber tone. Throughout the book, Knowles incorporates foreshadowing to express a more dark and somber tone. Foreshadowing is used in order to help the reader foresee future events in the story. At the beginning of the book, Gene is an adult returning to his nostalgic Devon, a New Hampshire boys’ boarding school. He reminisces about his youth and begins to search, in the pouring rain, for a tree that in his memory was, “Tremendous, an irate, steely black steeple beside the river” (Knowles 11). This observation is foreshadowing a dark event that eventually becomes part of the focus of the novel. In the quote, the author uses disconcerting adjectives, “irate, steely, and black,” to initiate a more dark and somber tone. He uses adjectives with negative connotations to hint to the reader that the tree is part of an unhappy and dark memory. Overall, the author uses a dark and somber tone throughout the book to reflect the gravity of its content. His style is interesting because it manages to incorporate a lot of foreshadowing that makes the reader curious and want to read more. The pacing was well done and realistic. Feelings of envy developed at an understandable pace, and the prologue to the plot's initiating event was good at setting the stage and hinting at what was to come.
2) The main character, Gene, is extremely realistic. He begins a bit bitter and envious of his roommate, Finny. Almost to the point where he wishes punishment upon him (since he was always so able to easily wriggle out of consequences). Although he later regrets this, he still feels a great need to compete with Finny. As a result, he sets his sights on becoming valedictorian. Considering that Gene is a young, innocent boy, I found his actions to be very realistic. The book illustrates his thought process and he reacts to his feelings, envy, fairly accordingly. It also emphasizes the fact that Gene very rarely stood up for himself. He often felt pressured to go along with whatever Finny or his peers were apt on. However, looking some years later, the book reveals how Gene has matured. Upon traveling back to his old school, he thinks to himself, “Looking back now, across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.” (Knowles 10). This quote means that he recognizes that fear occupied him at Devon [the school] and in doing so must mean that he has escaped from that fear. He realizes that he recognized himself and has moved away from being purely a follower.