Everyone, throughout their lifetime, acquires several enemies, whether they are external or internal. Enemies can triumph and take control over one’s life as well as be defeated. In the coming-of-age novel A Separate Peace, written by John Knowles, the main characters are presented with several enemies throughout their time at the Devon boarding school. Gene Forrester, Phineas, and Elwin “Leper” Lepellier experience several battles against enemies separate from the presently occuring World War II. The enemy in A Separate Peace is internal, including jealousy, insecurities, and facing the realities of war and adulthood.
Gene, especially, has many enemies. His main opponent is the jealousy that presents itself towards Finny. Gene is jealous of Finny’s athletic abilities, the way he gets away with everything, and the bliss he lives his life in. “Phineas could get away with anything. I could not help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little” (Leviathan 25). Phineas is so charming and full of life that he can break the rules and do forbidden things while finessing his way out of any reprimand.
Gene admits that he, too, is charmed by Finny but states that he also envies him. The mild statement of envy here foreshadows the consequences of Gene’s festering resentment of Finny later in the novel. Eventually, the envy grew and Gene formulated that Finny was conspiring against him. A war began at Devon when Gene developed the idea that Finny was intentionally sabotaging his studies. Finny’s grades were not exactly pristine, thus Gene believed he wanted to distract him with the nightly meetings of the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, entire night trips to the beach on the eve of a test, inventing the time consuming game of Blitzball, all so Finny could remain “better” than Gene and “on top”.
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One night, Finny asked Gene to come witness Leper finally leap from the tree, but Gene was now fed up. He accused Finny of trying to distract him, a thought he had been holding in and letting grow. Finny, flabbergasted, told Gene to stay and study because grades were more important since Gene was a remarkable student. “It wasn’t my neck, but my understanding which was menaced. He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he” (59). Gene realizes Finny was not trying to wreck his studies by distracting him.
Finny was not jealous or in competition with him after all. Somehow this realization angered Gene even more because this made Finny perfect since the enemy of jealousy was absent from his mind. That night, as Gene and Finny were about to take their nightly jump from the tree, Gene jounced the limb out of anger of Finny’s “perfection” causing Finny to break his leg. With a broken leg, Finny would no longer be “perfect”. Gene’s enemy of jealousy, in collusion with anger, drove him to cause physical pain to his best friend whom he loves dearly.
Another enemy present in A Separate Peace is insecurities. Throughout the novel Gene, the narrator, makes a few inward, and to at least this reader, awkward comments concerning the anatomy of his classmates. He appears to be admiring them, and, in fact, it is obvious he is, but I don’t suspect this is because he is aroused. I think rather that this can viewed as evidence of feelings of physical inadequacy. He is sizing himself up to these other boys and subconsciously noting how their features compare to his own. There are other occasions in the book at which Gene voices to himself feelings of inadequacy and this is likely just another that the author decided to be more subtle, although this particular aspect of the story is quite open for interpretation.
Another element of the story which illustrates Gene’s low self-esteem is his introversion. People who have high self-esteem, for the most part, are talkative extroverts. Throughout the book Gene doesn’t often outwardly voice his feels and concerns, and frequently allows others to make his decisions for him. Finny, before his fall, easily manipulated Gene and guilted him into doing things which he did not want to do. He didn’t allow Finny to do this necessarily because he was too weak of character for him to act on his own, but because he didn’t have the assertiveness and confidence necessary to allow himself to do so.
The final and most evident item in this story that speaks to Gene’s insecurity is the rivalry he created in his head with his friend Finny. Gene stacks his achievements alongside Finny’s and, in his head, creates a complicated rivalry; this is something that only an insecure person would do. He lives his life not for the joy of the action contained therein, but rather in hope of gaining happiness from superiority.
The main enemy and central conflict the boys at Devon face is reality; the reality of war, adulthood, and the real world. At Devon, the boys are isolated from the real world and the merciless, bloody reality of war. In a way, then, Phineas needed to die for the story to reach its logical conclusion. Men like Finny don’t exist in the world; they can’t, because they’re simply too good for it. Few relationships at Devon are not based on rivalry, Gene tells us, which is why he is disturbed when Finny removes himself from competition.
Finny lives in a world filled with fantasies in which there everyone is a winner. Either he will be corrupted by the world, or destroyed by it. Finny never faced the enemy of reality as a result, he vanquished. In the last line of the novel, Gene turns the tables, switching his focus from the exception to the norm, which he questions: “…if he was indeed the enemy.” Perhaps, he ventures, Phineas’s outlook was the better one. Maybe enemies are fictional, enmity a mere self-infliction. Either way, the adult Gene is still questioning and trying to learn, which is an optimistic response to his Chapter One hope that he would someday achieve growth and harmony.
