The novel A Separate Peace is set in 1942, shortly after the US entered World War II.
The main character is Gene Forrester, a shy, yet bright student attending the Devon School.
His roommate Finny is a charming and naughty boy who excels at sports.
Although the two boys couldn’t be more different, they end up becoming best friends.
Eventually, Gene becomes envious of Finny’s athletic prowess, and he assumes that Finny is also jealous of his academic success.
One day, while the boys are climbing trees, Finny reveals his sincere hope of seeing Gene achieve success in life.
Gene realizes that Finny has no ill feelings toward him at all.
He is so shocked by this revelation that he shakes the tree branch, as Finny is about to jump.
Finny suffers a terrible fall and shatters his leg, ending his sporting days.
Although most people, including Finny, assume it was an accident, Gene feels incredible guilt.
The next semester, Finny expresses his desire to make Gene a sports star and starts training him.
They dream that one day Gene can compete in the Olympics with Finny as his coach.
A boy named Brinker becomes suspicious that Gene intentionally caused Finny’s accident.
So he arranges a group of schoolboys to be the judge and jury.
Finny refuses to participate and rushes out of the room.
While leaving, he falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his leg again.
There are complications when the doctor operates on him and Finny dies.
At the end of the novel, Gene reflects on how special and pure at heart Finny truly was.
The author of A Separate Peace, John Knowles, was born in West Virginia, USA in 1926.
His father was a vice-president of a coal company, which provided their family with a comfortable life.
Like the characters in Knowles’s most famous novel, he too attended an elite boarding school in New Hampshire.
Following his graduation, Knowles served for a short while as a cadet in the US Air Force before attaining his bachelor’s degree at Yale University.
Afterwards, Knowles spent much of the next decade traveling through Europe and making ends meet as a freelance writer and journalist.
In 1959, he published his debut novel, A Separate Peace.
The book drew upon Knowles’s own life experiences at boarding school.
In fact, several of the novel’s characters were based upon his boyhood friends.
In later interviews, Knowles made it clear that his childhood school years were not as dismal as the ones portrayed in the book.
On the contrary, he recalls his youth as a rather joyous time in his life.
Upon its release, A Separate Peace became an immediate commercial and critical success, which provided Knowles with enough income to become a full-time novelist.
Although he released several other novels during his career, none approached the popularity of his debut.
Knowles passed away in 2001 at the age of 75, but his famous coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace, continues to capture the interest of young readers to this day.
The main theme in A Separate Peace is war.
Yet it is not the combat that occurs on the battlefield that is in focus.
Instead, Knowles deals with the inner war that people wage inside of their hearts.
A prime example of this is the jealousy that Gene develops towards Finny.
In the book, Gene states that he fought his own war at school and defeated his enemy.
This can be interpreted in two ways.
One is that he triumphed over Finny.
This statement could also refer to Gene overcoming his own evil nature which caused him to push Finny from the tree.
Finny’s fall is also symbolic of the ending of the boys’ innocence.
Before the incident, Gene and Finny are just naive children.
After the accident, they come to know that the world can be a hostile place and they must remain vigilant and protect themselves from danger.
Gene also learns that his actions can come back to haunt him, as he feels great guilt and sorrow for causing Finny’s injury.
Finally, the book also deals with the idea of codependency.
After Finny’s injury, he is forced to live out his dreams through Gene.
In return, Gene seems to depend on Finny for psychological support in light of his guilt.
Until Finny’s untimely death, the two boys’ identities were so closely linked that it’s almost impossible to imagine them apart.
However, after Finny’s passing, Gene seems to accept that he will have to put everything behind him and establish his own identity.