A Separate Peace Friendship Quotes

Have you ever had one of those friends that you feel like you’re always in competition with? In the book, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, the main characters, Gene and Phineas, or Finny, appear to be best friends. However, in Gene’s mind, they are always in competition with each other. Rather than friends, they are foes. Gene is a very complicated character in the sense that he has a lot of feelings and most of them are all at once. Learning to put your own feelings aside and be happy for someone even if you are jealous is a hard thing to do, but it would’ve helped Gene a lot. Gene assumingly worked through his issues with his emotions, but not until after a long, hard lesson about the impact of your actions on the world and other people.

Gene became angry because he was paranoid about certain things that Finny did, like getting him to do stupid stuff with him, jumping out of the tree, and distracting him from his studies. A quote that shows perfectly how angry Gene was about some of the stuff Finny did is this. “Then a second realization broke as clearly and bleakly as dawn at the beach. Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies. That explained blitzball, that explained the nightly meeting of the Super Suicide Society, that explained his insistence that I share all his diversions. The way I believed that you’re-my-best-friend blabber!” (Knowles 45). Gene comes to the conclusion that Finny is trying to sabotage him and his goals in school and life and that makes Gene really mad. He feels betrayed, even though everything that he is thinking and is angry about is all made up in his head. In reality, Finny was actually jealous of how easily school and confidence in your own self came to Gene, but Gene ended up twisting it around to make Finny the bad guy and his enemy. Another good example that shows Gene’s anger towards Finny is, “But examinations were at hand. I wasn’t as ready for them as I wanted to be. The Suicide Society continued to meet every evening, and I continued to attend, because I didn’t want Finny to understand me as I understood him” (Knowles 48). This quote shows that Gene thinks Finny is purposely trying to make Gene fail, but really, Gene could’ve not gone with and Finny wouldn’t have thought any less of him because of it. This all just goes to show that Gene looks at Finny like an enemy, but the feelings are not quite reciprocated, even after Gene purposely hurts Finny. Gene not only hurts Finny with his emotions and his words, but also with his actions, which is why Gene believes that he killed his enemy, which is Finny,