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Compare And Contrast A Separate Peace

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A renowned classic, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, is based on the heartbreaking truth of the darkness acquainted with adolescence. The time period in one’s life when their innocence begins to fade away and a foul emotion devours the entirety. The friendship between Gene, the intellectual, and Phineas, the athlete, represents this truth as their friendship starts to take a turn one summer. Similarly to most movie adaptations, in the movie adaptation of A Separate Peace, there is a considerable amount of contrast when a reader makes the comparison with the novel. The changes that were made in the movie affects the overall understanding, enjoyment and moral of the story. Even though the movie itself is not terrible, it is better and more realistic …show more content…

In the novel, all the boys develop and mature into adults while finally leaving behind their scared adolescent selves. Out of all the characters, Gene has the most character development, but it is not as visible in the movie because of the movie adaptation changes. Gene starts off as a jealous and foolish youth, “I only had to add, ‘pushed him out of the tree’ and the chain of implausibility would be complete…I could never say them, never…’I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of theories. Come on, reconstruct the crime. There we were at the tree. Then what happened, Sherlock Holmes?’” (Knowles 90-91). Gene’s character is constantly jealous of Phineas in both the movie adaptation and book, but in the movie, the background details for his reason of jealousy is noticeably vague. He plays off his guilt of jouncing the limb with foolish humor while talking to the boys in the “Butt Room”. These components are not expressed in the movie causing the viewers to find it troublesome when comparing his character from the beginning to the end of the story. In contrast to the movie, at the end of the novel, Gene enlists in the war and, “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 …show more content…

Furthermore, the elimination of specific significant context during the movie such as, the non-existent symbolism and the lacking in the department of character development allows the audience to create a reason to question the purpose of this movie. The changes made to this movie adaptation has the effect of producing an extremely dry storyline while representing the characters as a two-dimensional person rather than a three-dimensional character. After all the changes were made, the lesson that is a part of A Separate Peace is no longer as deep and meaningful. Even though the message still vaguely appears in the movie, it does not give the same impression as in the novel. This leads to the viewers to not feel a connection and empathize with the characters. The book has emotional appeal while this movie is just dull. Commonly, most movie adaptations are rarely ever on par to the original book, and this movie adaptation falls into the same category as the

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Point: Leper is like a blender because he is all mixed up. Evidence: After Gene’s trip to see Leper he is fully convinced he has become crazy after the frequent crying and the absurd talk between the two characters. Sadly Gene finally admits it and confirms when Brinker says “I’ll bet he cracked up, didn’t he? That’s what happened.” referring to Leper.

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A Separate Peace “ Explain how the title relates to the events of the novel and the themes of A Separate Peace. “ The title of this novel , A Separate Peace by John Knowles, relates to the story in a way that is not directly stated. Each reader must decipher the text to find the true meaning of the title. Each reader may have a different opinion on the underlying connotations of the title in relation to the novel. I have chosen to focus on the war aspect of this book, rather than the relationships between characters for I feel the novel would have a very different outcome, or overall feeling if the setting were anything but World War Two.

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690 Words | 3 Pages

Many people think of their best friends, and they are happy to see them, want to do things with them, and are just generally glad to have them around. However, in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, this is not the case with friends Phineas and Gene. In this novel, Knowles uses the protagonist, Gene forrester, to help show how betrayal can ruin friendships.

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In the end I found the film to be easier to understand vs the book as it was an easier and more straight forward plot line whereas in the book it seemed to jump around leading to constant flipping between stories and pages to get a better

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In the novel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Gene is a teenage boy who attends the boarding school called Devon. Devon is a sanctuary for young men before in the midst of World War II. The boys’ lives are surrounded by influences of war and influences on each other. Gene lives with his roommate Phineas (Finny) who he spends the majority of his time with. Being surrounding by each other all the time, all the boys in Devon influence who each other are.

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853 Words | 4 Pages

A Separate Peace written by, John Knowles, is an effective example of a book that uses interesting features to grasp a reader’s attention. In further detail, the author shows the characters envy and jealousy towards each other, as well as displaying many essential settings or objects in many unique ways. Alternatively, the author provides the reader with many different characteristics and mannerisms that support how the reader reacts and feels. Along with the character’s moods, the symbolism that the author demonstrates becomes properly beneficial to the reader as well. As an illustration, the author establishes the tree, for example, to value the many different memories or “flashbacks” that the characters had with each other throughout the

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439 Words | 2 Pages

A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, is an unsettling fable about the dark side of adolescence. The long-time American classic takes place during the early years of World War II at a New England boys’ boarding school, where Gene and Phineas are best friends, but become troubled by the loss of innocence as they progress in their adolescence. As the story progresses you see the two boys struggle to identify their own individual identity. The self-identity struggle both of the boys encounter serves as the basis for the major theme in the story of the threat of codependency to identity.

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1895 Words | 8 Pages

A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, tells a story of a 16-year-old boy, Gene Forrester and his various feelings that he harbors for his gifted best friend, Phineas. Throughout the novel, Gene is constantly living in the shadow of Phineas in which he grows to breed resentment, envy, and even hate. The juxtaposition Gene Forrester is caught up in is dealing with a love and hate relationship that causes him to enmesh in personal misgivings. Thus, people can be their own worst enemy if they don't learn to accept who they are. For in striving to be that, it can be said that insecurity is an invisible weapon that oftentimes kills our self-esteem.

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A Changed Life: Pessimism to Optimism Just like no one can escape death no one can escape the aftermath of a traumatic event. Even though trauma isn’t escapable it is overcomeable. The traumatic events that occur throughout A Separate Peace would lead most to say that it is a pessimistic book, but there are much deeper findings that is optimistic in the book. The optimistic view of the book is looked upon and isn’t the most obvious choice of the two but has many provable points.

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There are details left out of the movie that were in the book, the movie doesn 't demonstrate the ongoing theme of hunger as well as the book does, and the the movie does a better job with

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I enjoyed the movie better than the book. It included just the right amount of action scenes, description words, and details from the story. The story was amazing but I like seeing things more than reading them. I usually like the movies better than the book.

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978 Words | 4 Pages

In John Knowles’s novel A Separate Peace Identity is shown as what defines us and makes us be placed in other peoples perspectives. An author can use identity to place characters in the readers mind to portray them a certain way, just as John Knowles did in A Separate peace. An identity can be defined as who a person is inside and out.

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Throughout the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles, there are many important things portrayed that coincide with the fact that the book is a wonderful literary piece and should be a required book to be read by many students. The main characters Phineas or Finny, an athletic and caring young man, and Gene Forrester, an intelligent student at Devon with an undying hatred within himself, are very similar to a vast majority of high school students. A Separate Peace is an absolutely amazing novel and should be a required book read by every high school student because of the following: it relates to High School students, it demonstrates how hatred can turn into something very evil, and it teaches people how to forgive someone despite previous

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706 Words | 3 Pages

In A Separate Peace John Knowles makes a compelling story about two teenagers, Gene and Phineas, living life through war. They were best of friends at their high school Devon and they brought out the worst and the best in each other, yet they both added something more important to humanity during a time where friendships and humanity were betrayed by war. Gene took wrong ways in his friendship with Phineas and learned in a difficult way that there was no harsh competition between them. Phineas not believing in war needed someone that could understand what madness they were living in.

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781 Words | 4 Pages

The real meaning of A Separate Peace lies in the title, it also goes along with Emerson’s quote “envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide.” A Separate Peace was written by John Knowles in 1960. The novel is about two young boys that were best friends, but their friendship went downhill because of envy and imitation. One of the main characters and narrator of the novel is gene, he’s having a flashback about his days at Devon School and how they led to the present day. Throughout the book Gene is struggling to be find his own identity as he depends on his best friend (Finny) for everything.

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