Isabella Perez English 1 Honors Ms. Augustyn 4 December 2015 Competition in A Separate Peace Competition, specifically friendly competition, is one of the most natural factors in human relationships. While it can be used for pure fun, competition also inadvertently creates a healthy hierarchy between friends. Normally, the base of friendship itself is able to keep the competition from becoming overwhelming. However, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace suggests that self-doubt can cause the peace between competition and friendship to go awry and nearly ruin the most peaceful of relationships through Finny and Gene. Finny and Gene are introduced as two competitive, yet equal, best friends right away. The duo shows their peaceful relationship …show more content…
In one instance, when Finny breaks the school's swimming record but tells Gene not to tell anyone else, Gene believes he is doing this to showcase to Gene just how great he can perform without any previous training or effort (Knowles 56). In reality, Finny just didn't like the spotlight on him because by doing that he would be putting himself above others. By hiding his achievement, he kept himself at what he believed to be an equal position with Gene - one that was not higher than the previous swim-record holder. Gene's mind, however, turns Finny's good intentions into ones of malice with intentions of putting Gene to shame. When it comes to scholarly competition, Gene takes this shame/defeat and uses it to motivate himself to be better than his best friend. This motivation by putting Finny down can be seen when Gene says, "I was more and more certainly becoming the best student in the school; Phineas was without question the best athlete, so in that way we were even. But while he was a very poor student I was a pretty good athlete, and when everything was thrown into the scales they would in the end tilt definitely toward me. The new attacks of studying were his emergency measures to save himself. I redoubled my effort" (Knowles 70). The sense of over-competition Gene alone had developed between himself and Finny gives him the motivation to alleviate that shamed-feeling and put extra work into his scholarly studies so that he can finally overpower his friend through educational and athletic means. If he can be both scholarly and athletic, he'll have finally won in the overall competition of greatness between himself and