Making friends can come naturally, but maintaining it can be difficult. In the book, A Separate Peace, Knowles shows how friendship can become negative instead of positive. Gene and Phineas are two boys that attend Devon School during World War II. They have opposite personalities since Gene is smart and Phineas is athletic, but despite that, they’re best friends. But then Gene misunderstands Phineas and causes him to break their friendship by making Phineas fall off the limb, which resulted in a broken leg meaning that sports and enlisting to the army were gone. Eventually Phineas finally confronts Gene about what happened in the tree. At first he wanted nothing to do with Gene and later wants to believe it was a “blind impulse”. Phineas’ value and trust in their friendship made him believe that Gene didn’t make him fall on purpose. Gene felt very different about Phineas than Phineas felt about him. Gene began having wrong thoughts and started thinking that Phineas felt the same way that he did, “You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity…That way he, the great athlete, would be way ahead of me. It was all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it was all enmity” (53). Gene thought Phineas …show more content…
Gene followed Phineas all the way to the Infirmary because he felt like he belonged there. The next day, he met Phineas again but this time he confronted Gene about the tree incident, “It was just some kind of blind impulse you had in the tree there, you didn’t know what you were doing. Was that it?” (191). He still could not bring himself to think there was any other possibility, like Gene purposely doing it. A few hours later Gene came back finding out Phineas had died by a bone marrow that stopped his heart. Before he died, his last words to Gene were, “You’ve already shown me and I believe you” (191). This shows that he still knew and understood Gene since he was his best