A Desperate Peace

The back cover of A Separate Peace advertises an intriguing, perhaps eerie, portrait of friendship and lost innocence. A few pages in reveals what I found to be a psychological thriller. Protagonist Gene Forrester is insecure and impressionable. His inner dialogue is mostly an assessment of his competence, measured against his flawless friend Phineas. From his agile way of moving to his powers of persuasion, “Finny” has what Gene lacks. Intermittent descriptions of nature--which still seem to reflect the tensions and joys of life at boarding school--are breaks from Gene’s self-scrutiny. 

Finny’s ultimate claim to superiority is not his athleticism or charism, but his commitment to his childhood. A Separate Peace takes place during World War II. The students at Devon invent games with makeshift props, and yet are nearly eligible for the draft. Tensions build among students as life at Devon becomes increasingly responsive to the demands of the war. Finny rejects any patriotic obligation, instead indulging in a more juvenile form of rivalry. Gene depends on this escape. Finny encouraged play, feigning off the looming question of enlistment. He fostered a “careless peace” (Knowles 24), as the adult Gene describes.

As a student at Devon, however, Gene cannot yield to this peace. Instead, the illusion that everyone--even the most nonchalant--are enemies, sways him. Even diversion becomes a competition; Gene measures his competence by the standards of Finny’s ostensible ease. Ease, in fact, is more unattainable than any superficial virtue. Whether this detachment suggests that Gene caused Finny to fall from a tree in chapter four is up to the reader. Regardless, Gene’s thoughts are those of a pliant, fearful rival. The backdrop of the war, seemingly removed from life at Devon, dictated the behaviors of the students. Not even Finny, chronically silly, was immune to this hostility. 

David Levithan wrote in his afterword of A Separate Peace that the story is timeless because “its observations about human nature are still as true now as they were then” (Levithan 205). I am a seventeen year-old who has just read a story about other seventeen year-olds, and I agree with Levithan. The protagonist’s thoughts resonate with me even with our almost eighty-year divide. But human nature does not explain the book’s resonance. To critique a critic, “human nature”  is a lazy attribution for a more enduring truth. Contrary to what the title A Separate Peace suggests, an insular world does not exist. Our thoughts reflect circumstances around us, no matter how geographically removed they seem. This dependence may explain what Levithan called “human nature.” Gene was really just working with what he had, and what he had was boarding school, a war on, and an annoyingly perfect best friend. Under these circumstances, anyone might go a little crazy.