Dixon 2
toward Finny and what really happened at the tree. Gene’s deliberate decision to push Finny off the tree was just another crazy idea that the world was naive in believing to be true. The Olympics would continue on its steady four-year pattern unhindered by this fake war and Gene would compete in them. These sarcastic illusions allow the pair to temporarily live in a peaceful dream world amid war and the sinfulness of the truth-achieving a separate peace- but in their efforts their maturity and development of their own identities are affected. In A Separate Peace, John Knowles creates the codependent partnership of Phineas and Gene, contrived from mixed feelings they have about the reality of conflict and the war at hand. But these falsehoods hinder the formation of each individual’s own identity and leads to the destruction of the characters’ peaceful and innocent adolescence.
The synergetic relationship of Phineas and Gene, built upon codependency- one essentially needing the other- contrives one singular identity for the two partners. After the accident, Gene goes up to his empty dorm-room, once shared by himself and Finny. Peculiarly, as Gene begins to try on Finny’s clothes he has satisfaction in the fact that he looks strikingly like Finny in the mirror’s reflection.
“But when I looked in the mirror it was no remote aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to the life. I even had his humorous expression in my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness. I had no idea why this gave me such intense relief, but it seemed, standing there in Finny’s triumphant shirt, that I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again.”(62)
Dixon 3
With this statement, Gene noticed the flaws in his past character and vowed to take on the distinct characteristics of Phineas. The act of Gene adopting Finny’s clothes on the outside coincides with the changes that happened now inside Gene. Gene realized that Finny was always more noble, courageous, and moral than he ever was and his attempt to be more like Finny started with these clothes.
“So to Phineas I said, ‘I’m too busy for sports,’ and he went into his incoherent groans and jumble of words, and I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, ‘Listen, pal, If I can’t play sports, you’re going to have to play them for me,’ and I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become part of Phineas.” (85)
When Finny returns to Devon for the first time after his fall, Gene trains for the Olympics, as Phineas would’ve done. Gene lives out Finny’s life for him, doing the things he can no longer do and in doing so they become one identity.
During most of the novel, Finny’s joke about the war being a sham is a veil kept over Gene and Finny’s eyes clouding the thinking of Gene and Finny keeping them from the truth. When Gene confronts Finny out of pure guilt about the true cause of his accident in an attempt to become more like Finny, he does not accept this confession in an attempt to hold on to the one thing he had still left in his life.
Dixon 4
“Completely over the falls. I wanted to be sure you’d recovered. That’s why I called you up. I knew that if you’d let them put anybody else in the room in my place, then you really were crazy. But you didn’t, I knew you wouldn’t. Well, I did just have a trace of doubt, that was because you talked so crazy here. I have to admit I had just a second when I wondered. I’m sorry about that, Gene. Naturally I was completely wrong.” (83)
Finny acts oblivious to the fact that his best friend betrayed him and endangered his very life. Just as Finny creates this cover-up he also creates the fat men theory of World War II. Phineas cannot accept the fact that there is such chaos in the world so he shelters himself and Gene from the actual truth in attempt to keep his home at Devon and life peaceful. At the end of the novel, as war seems to become more and more of a reality at Devon, Finny and Gene’s relationship gets pushed to its limit and the two are forced to face the truth and reality. When Brinker takes the two out of bed late one night, they are pulled away from their childish dreams to the cold, hard reality of the war and their true friendship.
“He whirled around as though being attacked from behind. ‘You get the rest of the facts, Brinker!’ he cried. ‘You get all your facts!’ I had never seen Finny crying, ‘You collect every f-ing fact there is in the world!” He plunged out the doors.” (177)
Dixon 5
Having sheltered himself through all of the struggles in his relationship with Gene, Finny cannot bear the thought of his best friend deliberately putting him in harms way as he storms out of the mach-courtroom following Leper’s speech. He has no peace left to hold on to. The shield that Gene and Phineas lived by their last two years at Devon did not allow the two to grow in maturity and develop themselves into individuals.
Throughout the novel, feelings of security and contentment allow Finny and Gene to coexist as one unit, a symbiotic pairing of the two opposites. The two construct one identity, Finny living through Gene and Gene taking on Finny’s characteristics and mannerisms. They exist, codependent with one another, for the greater part of the book in a lukewarm mixture of conversation and feelings. The two never completely delve into the deepness of their relationship until they were forced to at the end of the novel. This attachment to one another proves unhealthy at the end of the novel in the feelings of blankness in Gene and in the death of Finny. Having all of the cards out on the table showed how evil and deep their connection really had always been and how truly fit the two were to handle the truth of war and their relationship.
