Leper Character Analysis Essay

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Elwin Leper Lepellier started off as a quiet and reserved introvert, but what he went through during his teenage years left an everlasting scar he will have to live with for the rest of his days. Leper was not a main character in the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles. None the less his influence on other characters and the storyline itself was immense. Leper’s impact on the story A Separate Peace was not given the attention it deserved. Furthermore, an analysis of Leper as a person and as a student is needed. His traits and interactions with the other characters make him a very interesting character. Leper is a great example of a round character. For most of the book Leper kept to himself, but this can be dangerous and proved to be so. For the first half of book Finny was a timid introvert.“With Leper it was always a fight, a hard fight to win when you were seventeen years old and lived in a keyed-up, competing school, to avoid making fun of him.” - pg 87-88. Here Gene describes how due to Leper’s different personality that it truly was hard to include him as one of their own .Leper …show more content…

He battled with an internal war while also enlisting in the army and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The first war he encountered was that of jealousy. Leper was jealous of Finny because he was Gene’s best friend. This is ironic because Leper is the complete opposite of his rival Finny. Finny is a social butterfly while Leper enjoys being alone. This feeling of jealousy brewed inside of Leper for most of the book. Leper was the first out of the boys to enlist in the army. This shocked both his peers and the reader due to his quiet and naive nature. “I see a lot I never saw before” - Leper page 135. Leper suffered from PTSD. It changed him into a different person. The effect of war changed him from a quiet introvert into a jittery psychopath. PTSD is a real world disorder that makes Leper seem even more