What is friendship? Friendship is described in the dictionary “a s the emotions or conduct of friends; the state of being friends.” Friendship is one of the most important relationships that people form in all their lives. Children build bonds when they are young and use those skills to continue fulfilling friendships for the rest of their lives. Throughout A Separate Peace by John Knowles the idea of friendship and conflicts between two young men, Gene and Phineas. Gene is a studious, unathletic, hardworking teenager. Phineas however does not like school but is very athletic. This novella shows the many conflicts between the two boys and how opposites attract.
At the dawn of the story, we see Gene, a transfer student from the South go to a school up north in New Hampshire. Phineas is immediately friendly to his new roommate, and the two boys become very well acquainted. When Gene fails a test after a secret trip to the beach with Phineas, he starts to think that Phineas is trying to stop him from succeeding academically. While this was a wild assumption, this created an internal conflict within Gene. Gene no longer could trust Phineas and began to have hostile thoughts toward him. For example, after Phineas accuses Gene of trying to be class Valedictorian, which was not really an insult, Gene thinks, “It was all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it was all enmity” (Knowles, 46). This shows how Gene really believed that someone who referred to him as “My best friend…”9(Knowles,23) was out to get him and see him fail. Gene never returned the compliment of “My best pal” because he did not sincerely believe
that Phineas was his best pal. This marks one of the darkest moments in the relationship between Gene and Phineas.
Everyone has thoughts, some even have hateful thoughts about those who they love the most such as friends and family. However, it is a totally different thing to have evil thoughts and turning them into substance. Gene acted on his thoughts and moved the limb of the tree he and Phineas were on leading to Phineas falling off and shattering his leg “With a sickening Thud” (Knowles 30). This is a turn for the worst in the so called ‘friendship ‘between Gene and Phineas. This act is an internal conflict with Gene until later in the Novella when his secret revealed. No true friend would cause that much harm to someone who they consider their friend. This series of events leads us to question whether the relationship between the two is really a ‘friendship’.
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The time period which Gene and Finny lived in was a very difficult time for people of their age as World War Two (WWII) was going on, and they understood that they would be drafted and separated from one another and most friendships did not last very long. While there is not a clear line between protagonists and antagonists in A Separate Peace, the way in which Finny and Gene dealt with their friendship defined whether that character was a protagonist or an antagonist. For example, one can view Finny as the protagonist and Gene as the antagonist in the story because Finny wanted to preserve the friendship between him and Gene while Gene had other intentions. Finny was always reassuring Gene that they are good friends, and he could not bring himself to admit that Gene caused him to fall off the branch. Gene, on the other hand, was jealous of Phineas’ athletic ability and suspected that he was trying to hold him back in his studies.
