John Knowles

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John Knowles

• Author of A Separate Peace
• Born in Fairmont, West Virginia
• At age 15, attended the Phillips Exeter Academy,
  New Hampshire, and graduated in 1945
• Joined the war effort as a part of the U.S. Army
  Air Force's Aviation Cadet Program

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What to know about Knowles

• With encouragement from novelist Thornton Wilder,
  who took interest in Knowles' writing, he started
  working on A Separate Peace, which became his
  first published novel.
• The author John Knowles, like his narrator Gene,
  was from the south (West Virginia, to be exact),
  and sent off to an uppercrust boarding school in
  New England for polish before university.
  However, unlike Gene, Knowles was no academic
  whiz at boarding school he came close to
  flunking out of school, and was never the genius
  student that Gene is portrayed as being.

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More to Knowles

• The novel A Separate Peace is a largely
  autobiographical work, drawing on Knowles'
  experience at Exeter to create the Devon school.
  Like Gene, Knowles attended a summer session at
  school to make up some classes however, the year
  was 1943, not 1942, as it is in his novel.
• Other than that, the summer session that Knowles
  describes in the book was very much akin to the
  summer session that he attended at Exeter. "We
  really did have a club whose members jumped from
  the branch of a very high tree into the river as
  initiation," Knowles has said of his book "the
  only elements in A Separate Peace which were not
  in that summer were anger, envy, violence, and
  hatred." (ClassicNotes)

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Major Characters

• Gene The narrator of the book, a student at
  Devon during World War II. His best friend at
  school was Phineas, a superior athlete, while
  Gene was better known for his academic skills.
  Gene has a definite dark side lurking beneath the
  surface, though he appears to be a good, honest
  person in his everyday life. The book is spawned
  by a later visit to Devon, and of his strong
  memories and lingering feelings about what
  happened in 1942 at Devon.

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Major Characters

• Phineas Gene's best friend and roommate, a
  remarkable athlete with a disregard for the rules
  and an innate ability to win people over. He gets
  Gene in quite a bit of trouble via his impulsive
  nature and instinctive disobedience, but he is
  very good at heart, and thinks the world of his
  best friend.

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Major Characters

• Brinker Hadley One of Gene's friends, Brinker is
  rather strange he makes long-running jokes with
  rather sinister undertones, seems very
  independent and determined, and seems like he's
  his own person. He's a bit of a paradoxical
  character, and a kind of foil to the rebellious,
  free-spirited Finny.

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Major Characters

• Leper Lepellier One of Gene and Finny's friends
  he is a soft-spoken, nature-loving boy, with an
  old soul and ways that are quite idiosyncratic
  compared with the other boys. He is an avid skier
  and naturalist, but, rather uncharacteristically,
  he decides to enlist, and is the first boy from
  Devon to do so. He becomes, for a short while,
  the symbol of American victories abroad.

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Major Themes

• Reflection is central to the novel the novel is
  spawned by a visit back to Gene's old school, and
  the work hinges upon a dialogue between the past
  and the present, and the relation of a man to his
  much younger self. Gene confesses that he is
  still stuck in the time of World War II his
  memory still has a tremendous hold on him, as
  evidenced by his ability to recall the goings on
  of fifteen years' past with such detail. The
  presence of memory, and its role over time, is a
  major theme of this book when Gene reiterates
  his thoughts on the past and on the lasting
  impact of the events he is describing, he only
  increases the importance of this theme within the
  novel.

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Major Themes

• Reality vs. memory Gene often shows how memory
  can be tinged by feelings that change how reality
  is perceived and recalled. This is especially
  evident when he looks for a tree by the river
  that has a special meaning to him. "It had loomed
  in my memory as a huge lone spike dominating the
  riverbank, forbidding as an artillery piece, high
  as a beanstalk," he says, his similes
  characterizing the tree as a great, forbidding
  mass (Knowles). Yet, when he sees it, he finds it
  "absolutely smaller, shrunken with age," and
  nothing like the great giant he had remembered.
  Perhaps the tree had actually shrunk since Gene's
  time but this is a more apt example how things
  can be obscured or emphasized in the memory via
  emotional factors, and a good introduction of the
  theme of memory versus reality. Gene remembers
  his old campus in one way, yet when he visits, he
  finds it quite different this happens often, as
  things can seem less imposing or important when
  revisited, yet be so huge in one's memory.

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Major Themes

• Rebellion vs. conformity Gene and Finny are a
  great example of this theme in action Gene is
  naturally a rule-abiding person, and Finny has an
  absolute disregard for rules. This difference is
  also represented in the differences between the
  summer session and the fall session. Finny
  himself embodies both of those, as he is able to
  fit in well enough at school, yet hold his own
  very eccentric opinions.

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Major Themes

• Innocence vs. age Gene tells of how they were
  children of "careless peace," set apart from
  adults by their lack of knowledge of the war, and
  their utter abandon to their own small, happy
  worlds. Lackadaisical activities of the happy,
  peace-enveloped juniors are juxtaposed with the
  semi-military drills that the seniors have to
  endure. Just as the war encroaches upon the boys
  at school, their adulthood also looms before
  them Gene feels this especially, and this is one
  of the things that traumatizes Leper, being
  suddenly thrown into the world of adulthood.
  Throughout the novel, Gene notes the difference
  between his state 15 years after Devon, and his
  state while at the school he notices differences
  between the way he is and the way he was, and how
  age has changed him all in all.

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Major Themes

• Denial Both Gene and Finny experience a great
  deal of denial in the novel, but of different
  types. Gene tries his best to deny that he hurt
  Finny, and that he has a dark streak in his
  nature that causes him to lash out at innocent
  people. Gene is a "savage underneath," as Leper
  tells him, and he never is able, not even 15
  years later, to come to terms with this. Finny's
  denial is of his best friend causing his
  accident he doesn't want it to be true, so he
  ignores it until Brinker's trial makes sure he
  cannot deny it anymore. Finny also denies the
  existence of the war as long as he can, and tries
  his best to use denial to construct his own kind
  of fantasy-world.

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Major Themes

• Conscience and guilt These two haunt Gene
  especially he feels a great deal of sorrow for
  what he did to Finny, yet he cannot face down his
  sense of responsibility and get rid of his guilt.
  Gene is not a bad person he does have a
  conscience, and does feel remorse, but he cannot
  face the part of himself that is guilty of the
  accident.

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Major Themes

• Gene and Finny as foils Gene and Finny, however
  close they are, are very different and in many
  ways, complementary beings. Gene is academic,
  Finny is athletic Gene is a hard worker, Finny
  is not Gene follows the rules, and Finny breaks
  them Gene heeds authority figures, Finny does
  his best to ignore them. The pair get along very
  well, but they seem to have little in common
  aside from their differences. The differences in
  their natures and in their reactions to Finny's
  accident and to the war show them as foils, as
  their differences, taken together, make a vivid
  portrait of two very different people.

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Major Themes

• War and peace Throughout Gene's schooling, war
  threatens to break in and destroy the fragile
  peace of the school. The summer session
  represents the height of peace, as nothing,
  except for Finny's accident, was able to
  interrupt the carefree joy of those days. But, as
  the fall session begins, war slowly begins to
  encroach on the boys they start their "physical
  hardening" at the school, recruitment officers
  start to come around, and the boys begin to talk
  about enlistment and the draft. The divide
  between peace and war is also representative of
  the gap between childhood and adulthood while
  peace holds out, the boys are free to be
  oblivious of the outside world, and are weighed
  down by nothing. But, when they are finally
  confronted by the war, they have to grow up the
  strain changes them from children into adults,
  and obliterates the peace of their youth.

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Major Themes

• Appearance vs. reality
• This book is made up of "Gene's" recollections,
  meaning that the content, events, and characters
  are all filtered through his individual point of
  view.
• This theme is especially notable in Gene's
  characterizations of himself, and of Finny. Gene
  tries to present himself as a rule-abiding, nice
  kind of person however, as we see from the
  events in the book, he is sometimes spiteful,
  jealous, and has quite a temper when he is
  stirred up. Gene is not a totally good person, as
  no one who intentionally injures his best friend
  and then tries to cover up the truth would be.
  However, Gene would be hard pressed to admit
  this, and tries to avoid the subject of his
  "savage" underpinning. Gene also represents Finny
  as a happy-go-lucky sort who has been through few
  problems and has no inner struggles. Even after
  Finny's accident, Gene insists that Finny has
  never been conflictedafter Finny has tried so
  hard to avoid implicating his friend despite his
  anger and bitterness. Finny is far more complex,
  as we find out at the end, than Gene would like
  to believe him to be and as Gene finds out, what
  is on the surface sometimes does not denote what
  is hidden underneath.

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Major Themes

• Change under crisis Many of the boys in the
  bookincluding Leper, Gene, and Finnyare forced
  to change when they come upon some sort of crisis
  situation, or some test of their characters.
  Under the duress of having entered the military,
  Leper loses his quiet innocence and becomes
  confused and angry. Finny's happiness and peace
  are shattered by Gene's hurtful actions against
  him, and Gene becomes a better, more forgiving
  person because of his friend's injuries. As Gene
  says, all of the boys at the school will change
  when they discover some oppressive, overwhelming
  force in the world change is inevitable, as the
  boys in the book discover for themselves.

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Works Cited

• ClassicNotes.com
• Google.com (images)