Name: Leung Julian
Form: 12C
Date: 5th November, 2005
A Separate Peace – Friendship
A Separate Peace is a story about two youths, Gene and Phineas, growing up at a beautiful boys’ boarding school in New England. Set at the background of the World War II, the friendship between them grows as the peace in Devon School diminishes.
Gene and Phineas are like two poles of a magnet, opposite yet bound together. Gene is academic, Finny is athletic; Gene is hard worker, Finny is not; Finny is the extroverted leader and Gene is his follower. Gene follows the rules, and Finny breaks them. Their personalities and strengths are different and yet they are inseparable.
“"It’s you pal," he said, "just you and me." He and I started back across the fields, preceding the others like two seigneurs. We were the best of friends at that moment"” (17). Gene becomes Finny’s best friend the moment he jumps out of the tree and crashed into Devon River as a result of Finny’s goading. Since then, Finny is the dominant factor in all the choices the Gene makes: “When I got myself into position to jump…I always jumped. Otherwise I would have lost face with Phineas, and that would have been unthinkable” (34). When Gene jumps, in a way he is throwing his life away to Finny, because from that point forward, Finny will be the overwhelming influence of his life.
At the early stage of their friendship, Gene always feels that Finny is such a great person: "He got away with everything because of the extraordinary person he was. It was quite a compliment to me, in fact, to have such a person choose me for his best friend" (29).
But somehow, Gene doubts Finny’s loyalty. As an adolescent, Gene’s insecurity causes him to suddenly believe that such a friend as Phineas is too good to be true. He suspects Phineas is dragging him along to keep him from being the top student. “Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies . . . 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).