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Friendships 'Internal Growth In John Knowles A Separate Peace'

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Jaelyn Jones Mrs.Adcock English II Hour 6 29 April 2024 Changes Internal growth happens inevitably, whether a person is striving for that change, or an individual will continue stagnantly letting life create its lessons to make that self-transformation. Many life teachings are to be displayed in A Separate Peace, all while World War II was present for the youth to endure. John Knowles' book had many lessons to learn involving the love of friendships, the complexity of self-reflectance, and the unavoidable changes in life. Friendship creates a strong connection between two people. Bonds can last through many things, and may even blind somebody from seeing betrayal. Gene and Phineas are two young boys who are best friends. The boys admire one another …show more content…

Creating much controversy, Phineas tries his best to avoid facing the truth about Gene's disloyalty that cost him his athletic dreams and life. Many confrontations and lessons happened between Gene and Finny, all while the two continued to love each other. Soul-searching is a hard journey in an adolescent's life. “It was only after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak”. Gene is a subtle, less confrontational person who more or less goes along with situations at the beginning of the book. This causes many avoidable issues with Gene, which soon leads him to assume Finny has the same mutual rivalry with him. Finny continues to show honesty and loyalty to Gene under competitive circumstances, leaving him victim to the tree incident. Gene realizes his own insecure mistakes caused him to end his best friend's life, which he knew he could not cry over. Reflectance is present in Gene after many tragic events, leading him to accept and forgive himself. Gene evolves in many ways throughout this book and grows internally from certain dire events. Gene, in the beginning, went along with many foolish decisions made by

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