Compare And Contrast A Separate Peace

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

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

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