Finny's Guilt In A Separate Peace

Christopher Plevniak

Mr. Hewlett

English II-II

26 February 2016

A Separate Peace

“Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud, It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear forgotten.” (Knowles 59-60). Gene Forrester describes his best friend Phineas' fall from a “tremendous tree, an irate steely black steeple beside a river,”(Knowles 6) Gene is an young

It becomes clear that Gene purposely jounces the limb. Right before the incident, readers see envy and hate rising to the surface of Gene. "[Finny] could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little..”(Knowles 18) He says that it all goes away before the boys jump off the limb for the last time "He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he" (Knowles 51) But, he really does not ignore this, he even says he was not at the same level as Finny. Gene could not just get rid of all that anger and jealousy in such a short period of time. “You did hate him for breaking that swimming record, so what?”(Knowles 53) He feels a lot of guilt for doing this. Gene comes to Finny later in novel and tries to explain to him that he really was the one who jounced the limb, which was the cause of Finny's plummet into the water. Finny simply does not believe Gene, but this makes Gene's guilt worsen. When the boys of the school decide to have a trial, Gene's guilt becomes increasingly worse. Throughout the novel, we see that Gene's guilt is seen more and more every time that the fall is

At the trial, Finny began to remember things that he did not remember immediately after the fall. He remembered that Gene was actually indeed up there with him, and could have jounced the limb. That makes Finny very upset and he storms out of the room. In his rush, Finny falls down the stairs and re-shatters his leg. “The excellent exterior acoustics recorded his rushing steps and the quick rapping of his cane along the corridor and on the first steps of the marble stairway Then these separate sounds collided into the general tumult of his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs”(Knowles 177). When the doctor tries to re-set the bone, bone marrow escaped and went straight to his heart. Sadly, Finny tragically dies. Here the author uses the fall to help the development of Finny's death. Readers see that if the fall did not happen, then Finny would not have died because Finny would have never shattered his leg. Gene would have never felt guilty, and the trial would have never happened. If the trial did not happen than Finny would not have stormed out of the room and fallen down the stairs. The author clearly uses the fall to develop the death of Finny, because without the fall the events leading up to the trial would have never happened, and Finny would not have taken such a bad fall that led to fatal surgery. Finny would have never died without him falling from the