A Separate Peace

Page/Paragraph	Quote	Interpretation
10/3	“Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it”	Gene lived in fear and eventually escaped it.
14/2-3	“The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it. So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.... Changed, I headed back through the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come in out of the rain”	The tree was changed from the last time Gene had seen it. The tree must have also changed him. “It was time to get out of the rain” might mean that it was time to let go of his past.
18-19/9-1	“……..breaking into what Finny called my ‘West Point stride.” Finny didn’t really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction…”	Finny considers authority necessary for order but kind of dislikes it.
24/1	“We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest.”	The boys are still young and their injuries are still only injuries. Whereas in the future, their injuries will determine whether or not they can fight in the war. Foreshadowing?
25/5	“I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn’t help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little”	Gene envies Finny for his ability to get out of trouble so easily. Does Gene envy him for anything else?
31/10	“…..then I realized in turning I had begun to lose my balance. There was a moment of total impersonal panic, and then Finny’s hand shot out and grabbed my arm, and with my balance restored, the panic immediately disappeared.”	Finny saves Gene from falling out of the tree. Finny is willing to risk falling himself to save Gene.
34/3	“...Finny’s life was ruled by inspiration and anarchy, and so he prized a set of rules. His own, not those imposed on him by other people...”	Finny is something of an anarchist, following his own rules and he acts on impulse.
44/4	“No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don’t want to do it in public.”	Finny does things for himself, not for recognition.
45/2	“To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too unusual for – not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry”	Gene finds that Finny is too good to beat and is too far ahead for Gene to rival.
48/3	“I should have told him then that he was my best friend also...But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth”	Gene doesn’t want to expose himself to Finny. Gene might feel that Finny might not be his best friend after all.
52/2	“If I was head of the class and won that prize, then we would be even...”	Gene feels that Finny wants to be better than Gene. Gene also is intrigued by the possibility that he and Finny could be even in some way.
53/1	“...up went the hope that there was anyone in this school – in this world – whom I could trust”	If Finny is trying to sabotage Gene’s schoolwork, then Gene cannot trust Finny. If Gene cannot trust Finny, then he can’t trust anyone.
54/1	“Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies....We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all”	Gene thinks that Finny is jealous of his schoolwork the same way that Gene envies Finny’s athletic ability. He thinks that Finny is faking their friendship so that Finny can be ahead of Gene in enmity.
59-60/7-1	“Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud.”	Gene caused Finny to fall out of the tree and possibly injured him.
69/8	“….I was thinking about you and the accident because I caused it”	Gene admits to Finny that he caused the accident
70/5	“Of course you didn’t do it. You damn fool. Sit down you damn fool”	Finny refuses to accept that Gene caused his accident.
70/9	“You see! Kill me! Now you know what it is! I did it because I felt like that! Now you know yourself!”	Gene reveals to Finny how he felt when he jounced the limb. He was struck by an unexplainable fury toward Finny.
74/2	“Still it had come to an end, in the last long rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas fell”	Finny falling marked the finality of the peace that summer had created.
74/4	“We had been idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking charge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had belonged only to us”	The students of Devon are making the transition back to school and the professors are trying to take charge.
79/4	“…..it was almost as if I were maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me”	Gene feels the need to defend Finny even though Finny wasn’t mentioned.
85/1	“‘Listen, pal, if I can’t play sports, you’re going 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”	Finny is going to live his life through Gene. Gene feels that his entire purpose of life was to become a part of Finny.
100/7	“To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life...I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap!”	Enlisting was symbolic of becoming a man and moving into the future.
102/1	“I owed it to myself to meet this crisis in my life when I chose, and I chose now”	Gene is choosing to enlist in the military rather than being drafted. This way he will have a choice as to what branch he joins.
108/2	“’Sure you can manage the shower all right,’ I said, ‘but what difference does it make? Come on Brinker’s always… Brinker’s always getting there first. Enlist! What a nutty idea. It’s just Brinker’s wanting to get there first again. I wouldn’t enlist with you if you were General MacArthur’s eldest son”	Finny has only been back at school for a day and Gene is already trying to please him.
115/9	“Well what happened was that they didn’t like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried the Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn’t use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they’ve cooked up this war fake”	Finny believes that the war is a plot created by the “fat old men” to keep the young people in line.
120/10-11	“You didn’t even know anything about yourself” “I don’t guess I did, in a way”	Gene has found himself to be a somewhat acceptable athlete and has as Finny put it “found his stride”
123/1	“This was my first, but not my last lapse into Finny’s vision of peace. For hours, and sometimes for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world.”	Gene finds it easy to take on Finny’s view of the world because he wants to envision peace in the world.
125/3	“I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive”	Leper makes a connection from the war to nature. He enlists with the ski troopers buying into the romanticized version of war.
136/2	“It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace”	Gene feels liberated by the forgetfulness of the war.
145/5	“You always were a savage underneath...like that time when you knocked Finny out of the tree”	Gene realizes that Leper knows that he knocked Finny out of the tree.
150/3	“The army has the perfect word for everything, did you ever think of that?...And the perfect word for me...psycho. I guess I am. I must be. Am I though, or is the army? Because they turned everything inside out”	Leper thinks that the army changes everything and makes you go insane.
156/1	“But by now I no longer needed this vivid false identity; now I was acquiring, I felt, a sense for my own real authority and worth, I had had many new experiences and I was growing up”	Gene is starting to discover that he is growing up and maturing.
159/2	“There was no rush to get into fighting....The thing to be was careful and self-preserving. It was going to be a long war”	The boys at Devon are in no rush to enlist in the military because they feel that there will still be a war going on when they graduate.
177/4	“Then these separate sounds collided into the general tumult of his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs.”	Finny falls down the stairs and breaks his leg again.
187/4	“We members of the Class of 1943 were moving very fast toward the war now, so fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, a mind was clouded and a leg was broken – maybe these should be thought of as minor and inevitable mishaps in the accelerating rush. The air around us was filled with much worse things”	Gene is suggesting that there may be a war going on inside Devon because the boys are in such a hurry to become military heroes.
190/5	“I’ll hate it everywhere if I’m not in this war! Why do you think I kept saying there wasn’t any war all winter?”	Finny admits that the war is real and why he had fabricated the plot of the fat old men. Finny wants to be in the war but can’t because of his leg.
191/5	“No, I don’t know how to show you, how can I show you, Finny? Tell me how to show you. It was just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that’s all it was”	Gene is pleading Finny for forgiveness and trying to explain why he jounced the limb.
193/6	“….As I was moving the bone some of the marrow must have escaped into his blood stream and gone directly to his heart and stopped it.”	Finny dies while the doctor is trying to set his leg.
194/3	“I did not cry then or ever about Finny....I could not escape a felling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case”	When Finny dies, Gene feels that a part of him has died as well.
200/1	“It’s your greatest moment, greatest privilege, to serve your country. We’re all proud of you, and we’re all – old guys like me – we’re all darn jealous of you too”	Brinker’s dad goes on about honor and glory in the war and how most of the older men wish they had been born during that time period so that they could experience the war.
201/3	“He and his crowd are responsible for it! And we’re going to fight it!”	Brinker feels that it is unfair that he will have to fight a war that older men like his father had started.
201/5	“Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart”	Gene disagrees thinking that a certain heartlessness causes war more than generations of people do.
203/4	“I was ready for the war, now that I no longer had any hatred to contribute to it. My fury was gone, I felt it gone, dried up at the source, withered and lifeless. Phineas had absorbed it and taken it with him, and I was rid of it forever”	Gene has no more drive because he believes that it died with Finny.
204/3	“I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there”	Gene’s enemy was his jealousy toward Finny and maybe even Finny himself.