On the Historical and Philosophical Implications of Literary Devices in A Separate Peace “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled,” said Keyser Soze in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, “was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Easily applicable to the inner struggle faced by every being, a quote such as this can be applied to any story fitting the conflict type “Man vs. himself.” Likewise, John Knowles’s now classic 1959 novel A Separate Peace provides a complex insight to the subject of inner conflict and subsequent loss of innocence through an early 1940’s boarding school student named Gene, whose narration provides a medium for Knowles to exhibit this theme by means of a recognizable and repeated use of symbolism, figurative language, …show more content…
An interesting use of similes and metaphors, increasingly related to the war, can be found as the plot advances. To define this deepening obsession, a simile refers to snowflakes as “noiseless invaders conquering” the school (92). Something as simple and expected as snow in the state of New Hampshire is thought of as enemy soldiers rather than the commonplace weather that it actually is. Furthering the relation of combat to civilian student life, the day of Finny’s winter carnival is metaphorically described as being “battleship gray” (131). Ironically, this is an event in which Gene states that he feels free and satisfied because the carnival seems so detached from the all-consuming war, even explaining the title of the book when he says “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” (137). The preoccupation with all things World War Two could only be interrupted only by this impromptu party. Despite frequently being spared from such harsh realities—and once even death—Gene still feels no remorse for his heinous actions towards Finny. It is as if there is a greater power within him, a decaying moral fabric that simply will not allow for guilt and acceptance unless drastic measures are …show more content…
The line “Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence” clearly stands out to the reader, preparing them for a guaranteed explanation of why Gene would explicitly mention a “death by violence” in his grim narrative (14). While this excerpt is later understood to be Finny’s fall from the tree, there is an even earlier and more specific reference to his second plummet that ultimately resulted in his death. Before Gene flashes back, he specifically and familiarly illustrates a certain set of stairs in a place introduced as the First Academy Building. “The marble must be unusually hard. That seemed very likely, only too likely, although with all my thought about these stairs this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me. It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact ” (11). Without any other context or knowledge of Gene’s life at Devon, this may appear to be nothing more than a marble staircase traversed on any average school day. However, the trained literary eye will focus on the last sentence and how the “crucial fact” that is the hardness of the stairs will be explained. With these questions in mind, and a keen recall of Devon’s buildings, the avid reader will feel an impending doom more intense than Brinker’s makeshift Chapter 11 trial had already insinuated. After Finny has fallen and died,