Character Analysis Of Leprosy In A Separate Peace By John Knowles

Leprosy is an infection that causes blisters, ulcers and rashes across the body. Being nicknamed after such infection tells the readers where Elwin “Leper” Lepellier stands in the novel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Leper had this name tagged onto him by students and teachers alike. Throughout the entire book he viewed as strange around Devon. Elwin was different from the rest of the boys that surrounded him. However, Leper came to be a perfect of example of what Devon created for the boys, and how it would affect their relationships with the war.

Although Leper was viewed as an outcast, he held strong to a simple happiness that he would carry around for anyone to see. Gene describes him as such at their talk at the beaver dam,“his

The version that Gene sees now is strange and foreign to him, “His eyes were furious now too, glaring blindly at me… none of this could have been said by Leper of the beaver dam.” After Elwin “escapes” the war, he is changed into someone that is unrecognizable to the people who he once called his friends. Leper went to war to face the inevitable. He figures that if he joins the section that he wanted to, the pain that comes with the draft would be overridden. Soon he learns that the war was something that he, and all of the Devon boys, are not prepared for. It wrapped itself around Leper so tight that it drove him insane. War would eventually overtake the bubble of peace that protected Devon as it overtakes most things. Leper became a example to the boys of what going to war would mean. It changed the simple, nature-loving boy to a person who was overcome with emotions darker than most people could imagine. Leper became the stone thrown into the pound that many people would feel the ripple

Leper asks Gene, “Would they bother you if you did, if you happened to keep imagining a man’s head on a woman’s body, or if sometimes the arm of a chair turned into a human arm if you looked at it too long, things like that?” This had a large impact on readers as it strikes some of the scariest, and deepest fears that we bury within society. The picture of a innocent person being completely dismantled and thrown back together changes our whole perspective on what the war really did to people. It relates back to Devon as an example of the unpreparedness of the whole school for what was to come. Although many of the boys understood their fate, they did not understand that it was something that could envelop their mind and destroy their sense of peace. Leper became a shining example that would strike fear into the hearts of not only the characters in the book, but the