A Separate Peace Isolation

Boys Will Be Boys There are many great novels that take the idea of isolating boys from everything else and seeing how they will survive or respond to each situation. The boys will typically act in an indecorous way until they understand the full extent of the situation they are in. In the novel, A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the boys are isolated from the outside world and are supposed to be preparing to enlist in the war, but they do not take that obligation seriously until drastic things happen and change their perspective. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, is one of those stories and tells about all of the boys struggles to survive while alone on an island. This theme of isolation is one that shows up in a myriad of books, movies,

This theme is so major in both because of the way the boys are placed in a school with no girls and are trained specifically for one purpose. In the movie A Dead Poet’s Society, the boys are in a private school that teaches them respect, discipline, honor, and excellence and is meant to prepare the boys for a future in a well respected college. In the book, however, the boys are being prepared to go to war, not college. All of them are put in that school and away from their families, but in A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the boys do not leave the school to do family things as often as the boys in A Dead Poet’s Society do. The way the boys are isolated from the world makes them band together in both stories because they want to feel like they belong to something significant, so, they both create or take over secret societies. This short lived in A Separate Peace, by John Knowles because of the incident that Phineas endures alongside of Gene. As a routine for the Secret Suicide Society , they all jump from the tree into the river every time a meeting is held, but this time was different because Gene felt scared and did not know why he went up there with Finny. At the top, he hesitated and wiggled the branch a little bit causing Finny to fall to his doom and break his leg in the

In books and movies, they make it so you attach yourself to one character or two characters in particular. Getting attached to that particular character leads to deeper feelings when things happen to that character both good and bad. It is almost like you picture yourself as that character and you feel what they feel and sympathize with them like the author wanted you to. Phineas is one main character that people tend to attach themself to in the novel, A Separate Peace, because he is the one trying to make the military school more fun for all the boys and just wants to have fun. Near the end of the book Finny breaks his leg for the second time and has to go into surgery. After all of the mixed emotions the reader goes through with him, the last thing we wanted was for him to die, but that is exactly what