Monday, March 7, 2011
Blog Topic #5: Personal Review
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, is the typical bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. It recounts the story of Gene and Phineas, best friends, and their experiences of their summer after junior year through their senior year at Devon School during World War II. To every other student and faculty member, including Phineas, their friendship is full of love, but to Gene it is filled with much more. Gene harbors deep feelings of jealousy towards Phineas which indirectly leads to the death of Phineas at the end of the novel. This evolution of feelings from love to jealousy, to dependency and loss is magnificently portrayed through the writings of John Knowles. One of the most interesting characters is Phineas. Knowles created a character that could not possibly do any harm to anybody, almost a Savior-like character. Phineas goes as far as to believe that there are only winners in games and never losers. He is very intellectual in his own specific way for he does not receive the greatest grades, but he seems to have profound insight on every topic discussed at Devon. One of my favorite aspects of A Separate Peace is that it was told through Gene’s flashback. By doing this Knowles is able to delve deeper into the mind of Gene and discover many of the mysterious feelings behind his actions. Overall, John Knowles did an excellent job at conquering the language and manipulating it to tell his story.
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I completely agree with you on the style the author uses to convey his complex novel. The story has twist and turns that give us room to dissect Gene's character on a more personal level. Your depiction of the "savior" like figure of Phineas, I believe, is spot on. Throughout the novel he seems to remains stationary while his best friend Gene suffers a bit more than Phineas during his stages of becoming a man. I think your interpretation of the novel is similar to mine in that we can both see the self-conflicts the main character has within himself. Overall, I thought your review was adequate in analyzing the characters purposes in the novel. Well done Mackian.
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