Study Guide to A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for John Knowles, A Separate Peace, a novel that portrays the events of World War II through the eyes of teenage boys.

As a novel of the 1950s, this story portrayed the loss of innocence that occurred during the war. Moreover, this novel continues to provide reader's a different perspective of World War II. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of John Knowle's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

JOHN KNOWLES

INTRODUCTION

 

A WAR NOVEL

John Knowles’ A Separate Peace is an intensive inquiry into the nature of war. It is the story of how a group of sixteen-year-old boys, all students at Devon, an American preparatory school, attempts to establish a peace far away from the war in the large outside world. Each boy, in a different way, views the war as a disaster which will sweep them all away unless it can be resisted. Each student, as he nears eligibility for the draft, confronts the facts about war in a different way. While Knowles never takes us into real war, in the sense of combat, he leads us into the war through the ways in which war is viewed by maturing adolescents on the brink of being called to do their part. Thus A Separate Peace is, first and foremost, a war novel. But because the action takes place far away from the war, it is a very unusual war novel.

MAINSPRING OF WAR

Knowles’ conclusion about the cause of war is presented through the thinking of the narrator, Gene Forrester. In attempting to enjoy a “separate peace” at Devon the boys, in fact, engage in warlike activities. They are unable to escape from the concept of war merely because they are removed from the battlefield. As human beings they are all potential warriors. Men everywhere share one supreme defect, a tendency to make war. The nature of the enemy changes but the nature of the warring instinct does not. As Gene states four pages from the end of the novel, “it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.” Because of this basic human ignorance, war will always exist in one form or another, if not on actual battlefields, on school playgrounds, and in the minds and hearts of individuals everywhere. This tendency is not so much to be pitied as simply to be recognized. Although some of the boys at Devon can, with varying success, ignore the reality of war temporarily, sooner or later this reality will come crushingly in upon them. War will intrude into private “separate” peaces everywhere.

POINT OF VIEW

The novel is narrated by Gene Forrester. Knowles is, in effect, the narrator; he does not even tell us Gene’s last name until the sixth chapter, and then only incidentally. The name of the narrator is unimportant, inasmuch as we are listening to the author, Knowles himself. The book is narrated from the point of view of a student returning to Devon fifteen years after graduation. The narrator allows himself to be transported into the past, into a very special kind of preparatory existence for life on the outside. The narrator therefore has fifteen years’ hindsight. He is able to understand more in retrospect than he originally could in anticipation. The wisdom of Gene Forrester is the wisdom of John Knowles as a matured young man. The narrator Gene Forrester realizes that he fought the real war while still at Devon. Since graduating Gene has been in the army; he went to boot camp but the war ended sooner than anyone expected. As the narrator states, “I never killed anybody, and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.” Gene understands this now, fifteen years later; it is important to remember that he is writing about something long in the past, even though the story is so vivid that it seems to be the present. Gene realizes now - but did not originally - that each of his friends was almost unconsciously trying to erect a defense against a suspected threat, the war.

THE UNIQUENESS OF FINNY

Finny is the only boy at Devon who does not actually fear the war. As a competitive sportsman, Finny feels no need to erect a barrier between himself and the war. In fact, after his accident, he fears that he will not be able to be in the war. When he does not hear from the various American armed services -Marines, Navy, etc. - he even writes to Russia and China, to see whether he can perhaps be in the war by fighting in their armies. He creates fantastic illusions to replace the reality of the war because he fears he will not be able to enlist. He alone, however, does not erect what Knowles visualizes as a private Maginot Line.

From the beginning of the novel, Knowles has made it very clear that Finny is unique, is a special kind of human being. He exerts a hypnotic and charismatic charm over Gene and the other boys. He realizes that some of his actions - like establishing the Devon Winter Olympics - were escapes from the reality of the war, a war whose actuality is brought home through the tragic destruction of Edwin Lepellier, or Leper as he was called. Leper’s tragedy becomes Finny’s confrontation with his own idea that the war did not really exist, that it was the fabrication of a bunch of fat, middle-aged men whose self-interests perpetuated the gigantic rumor of war.

THE SETTING

When the novel begins, it is the summer of 1942. America is at war and summer session is open at the Devon School in New Hampshire. Newsreels and magazines are presenting pictures of war to the whole country. Bombs are being dropped by America on Central Europe. The summer is a moment in history, and Knowles offers us some of the characteristics of that moment:

“The war was and is reality for me. I still instinctively live and think in its atmosphere. These are some of its characteristics: Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the President of the United States, and he always has been. The other two eternal world leaders are Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. America is not, never has been, and never will be what the songs and poems call it, a land of plenty. Nylon, meat, gasoline, and steel are rare. There are too many jobs and not enough workers. Money is very easy to earn, but rather hard to spend, because there isn’t very much to buy. Trains are always late and always crowded with ‘servicemen.’ The war will always be fought very far from America and it will never end.”

This then is the picture of America as a nation involved in a war being fought on foreign soil. Knowles is able to recollect the atmosphere of America in that distant summer of 1942.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS

It is important to bear in mind that the boys in the story are sixteen years old. They are not quite old enough to fight for their country. They are regarded by the adult world as the last people in the youthful world. Adults want the sixteen-year-olds to enjoy themselves now while they can, because soon they will be fighting to protect these same adults. The adult world is anxious for the boys to have a last happy period in their life before they go to war. The narrator states his belief that sixteen years old is the natural age for a human being to be.

TECHNIQUE AND STYLE

The basic technique employed by Knowles is the use of youthful point of view. Because the narrator slips back into his past world, into the time when he actually was a student at Devon, the style of expression becomes that of a sixteen-year-old boy. Knowles’ technique is to transport the reader back into that private world, and his sentence structure, dialogue, use of idiom, suggestion of terror, and reference to the landscape all blend together to create the exact mood and circumstances that prevailed at Devon in 1942. The dialogue is crisp and explosive; the emotions are given expression in ways we expect from sixteen-year-olds. The landscape is depicted impressionistically; that is, we learn the geography of the world at Devon through selective impressions. Devon arises between old houses nearby on Gilman Street; there is the Far Common, a wide open ground, and there is the, First Academy Building. There is the Field House for athletic equipment known as The Cage; there are the Playing Fields. There are New England Elms, three dormitories, and a grove of trees alongside a river. The world in which the narrator moves is in fact very small in a physical sense, but Knowles’ technique of seeing this world through the eyes of a student transforms it into a universe. The proportions are monumental, for things seem bigger than they are.

DEVON’S UNIVERSALITY

One reason that Knowles transforms the world of Devon into a larger one is that he wants Devon to be considered typical of the world inhabited by all sixteen-year-old boys at this moment in history. Devon thus acquires a universality, becomes, in other words, representative of all boys’ schools in America in the summer of 1942. Devon becomes a symbol of “separate peace” enjoyed - but also abused - by those young men who do not yet need to be off fighting a war. Devon becomes a place in the imagination, not simply a place in New Hampshire. Devon becomes a universal symbol for a certain framework of experience - the experience of separate peace - just as Eden is always a symbol for a framework of innocence.

A SEPARATE PEACE

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

CHAPTERS 1 - 4

Note

In order to discuss certain themes and the development of the different characters, it is useful to divide Knowles’ A Separate Peace into three sections, each about four chapters of the book.

CHAPTER ONE

The narrator of the novel, Gene Forrester (we do not learn his name until later in the book) returns to the Devon School in New Hampshire from which he graduated fifteen years ago. He walks slowly through the town (it has no name) and across the Devon campus and athletic fields until he discovers a particular tree near a river. He comes in out of the rain and the narration switches back to the past; the narrator begins to speak as a student once again. There are five boys present and the leader, Phineas, dares everyone to jump from a branch of the tree out over the bank into the river. Phineas jumps, Gene jumps, but the other three - Edwin Lepellier (called Leper), Chet Douglas, and Bobby Zane - are too scared to jump. On the way back to dinner, Phineas and Gene fight for amusement and in so doing make a silent agreement that because of fighting they will be too late to eat dinner, that is, they will thereby break a rule.

Comment: Purpose Of The Chapter

The opening establishes a large number of important facts and ideas. In the first place, Gene’s walk across the landscape at Devon is a piece of skillful narrative; as Gene describes his surroundings we, as readers, also become acquainted with them; what is recollection for the speaker is introduction for the reader.

Secondly, and most importantly, the seeds of the relationship between Phineas and Gene are sown. Gene, after all, is the only one of the four other boys who is willing to respond to Phineas “dare” to jump from the tree. This makes Gene special in Phineas’ eyes. When Phineas begins to fight with Gene after tripping him, both boys realize they share a distrust and hatred for a regimental life. That they must hurry in order to eat dinner at the right time suddenly strikes them both as odious necessity. Having to obey the rule regarding the time for eating epitomizes having to obey all the other rules which dictate the behavior of students at a private preparatory school in New England. When Phineas trips Gene and jumps on him, he is, in fact, challenging Gene to be disobedient. It is an event which parallels jumping out of the tree. When minutes later Gene tackles Phineas, it is his way of consenting to rebellion. Just as he had been willing to be “dared” into jumping from the tree, so he is willing to “dare” to break the school rules and miss supper. In the jumping and in both fights, then, the bond between Phineas and Gene is cemented. They will have a very special relationship to each other throughout the book, and Knowles has skillfully suggested their uniqueness in the opening episodes.

Establishing The War Theme

Another of the purposes of the opening chapter is to introduce the theme of war. Knowles wants the reader to realize from the start that there is an actual war taking place at Devon. This is the subtle war among the boys themselves. To remind us that America was at war when the story takes place, the very first paragraph suggests that in 1942 the school was not as shiny as it now is because at that time there was a war on. We also learn that this summer session of school at Devon has been designed as part of the national war effort; classes must keep going all the time because students may be sent off to war any minute. The tree from which Phineas and Gene jump has been mastered by older boys; but Gene and his friends are all in the class known as Upper Middler and no Upper Middler had ever jumped from the tree. The point is that Phineas and his group are all young and not of draft age. Boys who had jumped out of the tree before are now all off fighting.

Symbolism Of The Tree

When Phineas leaps out of the tree down into the water, he cries out, “Here’s my contribution to the war effort!” For Phineas, jumping out of the tree is an act of war; symbolically, the tree is a troopship which is being torpedoed. It is necessary for the imaginary soldiers to abandon the ship when it is being torpedoed and thus Phineas jumps overboard into the water. As a soldier, Phineas feels that it is very important to perform manly acts of valor. Jumping out of the tree is a courageous act; it is dangerous to jump but nevertheless necessary. In war one must be willing to make sacrifices and to forget fear. In order to prove to Phineas that he too is courageous, Gene feels he must jump. It is the only action which a good soldier can take if he wants the respect of his men. This is why Gene is accepted as Phineas’ special friend; Gene wins Phineas’ respect as a fellow soldier when he jumps from the tree.

Fear

It is logical to assume that where there is courage, there is also fear. Gene hints that he is frightened from the very beginning of his recollection. He recalls the “well known fear which had surrounded and filled” the whole school when he had been a student there; he feels “fear’s echo.” When he climbs up into the tree, he is filled with “a sensation of alarm all the way to [his] tingling fingers.” In short, Gene is filled with various indefinable fears - he is afraid of the physical act of jumping from the tree on the one hand, and of Phineas’ power to induce him to jump on the other. He is, above all, afraid to reject Phineas’ dare. That the other three boys are afraid to jump is of course evident from the fact that they do not jump. This opening symbolic act of courage suggests the atmosphere of the entire book, which is filled with confrontations of frightening actions.

Over-All Significance

By establishing the theme of war, by introducing the tree as a symbol, and by depicting the fear the boys have of jumping from the tree, Knowles creates a vivid world filled with potentially frightening challenges. Phineas has coldly executed a war man...