Character Analysis: A Separate Peace By John Knowles

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person ‘the world today’ or ‘life’ or ‘reality’ he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries this stamp of that passing forever.” (Knowles 40). The novel begins with a narration by Gene’s adult self, looking back on his past. Later in the novel, we see adult Gene’s perspective of the war, stating that “For me, this moment… was the war.” (Knowles 40). The entirety of the war defines Gene, and allowed him to change and mature into the person who goes

He feels that his actions were so dark, so horrific, that he could not ever know kindness again. He wanted Phineas to be even with him, yet his actions caused Phineas to be so far behind him that he can no longer compare. This causes him to finally be able to understand freedom in chapter eight. Gene always wanted to be equal to Phineas, and now he feels that he has surpassed the bar that Phineas left. Gene believes that he is freed from the torment of needing to measure up to Phineas, which is shown when he thinks, “…I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear” (Knowles 120). He thinks that he has finally cast off all of the chains that held him in Phineas’ shadow. He thinks he is freed. This freedom does not last, due to Brinker Hadley’s suspicion of

He shows this when he thinks, “During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.” (Knowles 202). He has found a balance of himself and Phineas that enables him to be at peace within himself, and externally. He has become his own individual, and has matured enough to realize that he can be. When he returns to Devon School fifteen years later, his maturity is further shown in his reflections. He notices more details that he knows that he never would have noticed as a young man. When he looks for the tree, he realizes that it was one of many in a grove of trees. He remembers it as “… a huge lone spike dominating the riverbank… Yet here was a scattered grove of trees, none of them of any particular grandeur” (Knowles 13). As a young man, this tree had made such a powerful impact on his life that he believed it to be much larger, and more defined than anything else around it, but as he matured, it began to lose its hold on him, until it was just another tree to him. Once he has found it, he realizes that it has shrunk in comparison to him. This causes him to speculate, “Nothing endures, not a tree,