Gene's Perception Of Phineas In A Separate Peace

Everyone faces conflict or struggles one time or another. A person’s view, or perception, of a situation can be positive or negative. Therefore a person’s perception will determine how that person behaves. When a conflict arises, a person’s perception plays an important role. In “A Separate Peace”, the primary conflict is Gene’s perception of Phineas, who was often called Finny, causes struggles in their friendship. Deceived by his own thoughts, Gene pushed Phineas to a point where Phineas could no longer excel. Since Gene’s perception of Phineas was wrong and since Phineas never fought back, this novel was not a man verses man conflict but a man verses himself conflict. In “A Separate Peace”, there were several factors leading to the outcome,

Then that untrue idea, or the untrue perception, grows and dwells until it becomes the honest truth in a person’s mind. Meaning that the mind can distort things and make something seem larger than it actually is, Gene quotes, “It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet.”. Gene also finds many reasons to support why he thinks of Phineas as a threat. “Phineas in those days almost always moved in groups the size of hockey teams”, as Gene said in the novel tells the reader that Phineas was very popular and many people liked to be around him. Gene has also spoken of many trophies and plaques with Phineas’s name on it that exemplified his great athletic abilities. Phineas’s charisma was defined by his ability to “get away with anything”, Gene said, such as the time when Phineas persuaded a teacher to let him wear a pink shirt. During the summer before they began the twelfth grade, Phineas invents a club called “The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session”, which met every day, a game called Blitzball. Gene thinks that Phineas used this to take study time away from him causing Gene to fail. This was used to support Gene’s idea of Phineas trying to sabotage his chances of eclipsing Phineas by becoming velenvictorian. In all these