A Separate Peace †Denial of Truth Essay

The novel A Separate Peace focuses mainly around a 17 year old named Gene Forrester and his psychological development. The story is set in a boys boarding school in USA during World War II. There are four main boys in the novel and they all undergo major character changes through the story. One of them goes crazy, and the others experience severe attitude changes. Gene is caught right in the center of these changes. He is very close with all of the other three boys, and thus all of the changes affect him very much. Due to all the tension occurring in this novel because of the war and events going on at the school, there is a lot of denial of truth happening. Three of the four boys mentioned earlier deny the truth at sometime in the story. This denying of truth sometimes ends with the person who committed the fault in a bad condition at the end of the book, and sometimes in good condition. So it can be said that there were both positive and negative results for each of the denials of the truth, but these will be explained more in-depth in the following paragraphs. Although it starts after half the book is finished, one of the major examples of denying the truth in the novel is Finny denying the reality of the war. Though it is disclosed at the end that Finny knew all along about the war, he succeeds, after a little time, in making Gene truly believe in the non-existence of the war (although Gene claims that he did not really believe the story, his behavior around his classmates and his actions say otherwise). The first result we see of this denial is Finny’s confession of his bitterness towards the world because of his loss. This destroys the image we have of Finny as a â€Å"perfect† person because it shows that he blames the world for his accident. It also stuns Gene so much that he begins to do pull-ups, even though he has never done even ten before. With Finny’s verbal help, Gene manages to do thirty. This solidifies the friendship between them. After this moment, Finny decides to take Gene into his confidence and tells him he wanted to go to the 1944 Olympics, but that Gene will have to go instead, and goes on to start training Gene. Finally, after many mornings of hard training, Gene finally â€Å"[finds] his rhythm†. Superficially, it can be said that due to Finny’s ruse about the war, Gene became very athletic. A deeper study shows that the incident is much more meaningful than this. It symbolizes Gene coming into his own. The author writes that Finny â€Å"seemed older that morning? he seemed smaller too. Or perhaps it was only that I, inside the same body, had felt myself all at once grown bigger†. It may also be said that on this morning Finny (a model of athleticism) became part of Gene. So, it can be seen that Finny’s denying the reality of the war was truly one of the more important examples of denial of truth in the novel because it resulted in, among other things, a greater bonding between Finny and Gene and shattered the image of Finny being truly composed and serene. Another example of denial of truth would be Leper. Leper, as is obvious throughout the story, continuously denies reality. He is very often be in his own ? dream world’, and when he isn’t he is shy and hesitant to show his true feelings. This was likely because he was â€Å"difficult not to make fun of†. For example, at the beginning of the book, when he claims Gene’s jump was better than Finny’s and is rebutted by Finny, â€Å"he didn’t argue or refuse. He didn’t back away. He became inanimate†. There are also many examples of his not being conscious of his surroundings. One of them is when Gene is thinking about him when he sees him on his way to clearing railroads. Gene recalls that while most of the boys are listening to the announcements, Leper â€Å"made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook†. Then, when Gene strolls up to talk to Leper, Leper comments about skiing paths. Someone choosing to ski over helping clear a major railroad in the middle of the greatest war of all time is quite odd. He is not even skiing anywhere in particular, just skiing to see nature. He also disagrees strongly with downhill skiing, because it takes away from viewing nature. He thinks that only nature matters and the entire world is as peaceful and going as slowly as he is. Later on, when Leper is considering joining the army, we see more of this denial of reality. He chooses to join a branch of the army that he once thought â€Å"ruined† skiing. He actually believes that when he enlists he will spend all of his time skiing down slopes. This shows that he does not truly understand the seriousness of the issue. Although the positive points of Leper’s denial of truth are much smaller than the negative ones, they do exist. Due to his denial of truth early on in the book, Leper went partially insane near the end of the book, but it can be seen at many points in the book that Leper finally gained some assertiveness and shed aside his timid personality. The next example of denial of truth is Finny’s denial of the evil in other people. Finny represents the goodness that is in human beings. Because he is so good, he has difficulty understanding how other people can have evil in them. This denial of truth gets him into a sorry state at the end of the book. There is an indication of his truthfulness early on in the book, when Gene comments that â€Å"Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this shocked people then he was surprised†. Finny is the guy who is always calm and nice. He is so surprised when Gene confesses to him that he purposely caused Finny to fall out of the tree that he refuses to even believe Gene, and calls him a â€Å"damn fool†. Even prior to this, when Gene sees Finny in the school infirmary, Finny tells Gene about how he thought that there might have been some foul play up in the tree when he fell, then immediately apologizes to Gene for having that feeling without even waiting for Gene to check the legitimacy of this feeling. Afterwards, on the first day of the actual school year, Finny calls Gene to talk to him. When Gene claims that he was â€Å"crazy† and â€Å"over the falls†, Finny doesn’t refute this, and even goes as far as to apologize once again for thinking that Gene was perfectly serious. With his open, honest nature, Finny cannot truly accept that Gene, who he considers his best friend, pushed him off the tree. Finny’s reluctance here can also be compared to another incident in the book. After hearing about Leper going crazy, Finny says, â€Å"I guess I always knew [about the war], but I didn’t have to admit it†. Finny knows that Gene really had caused the accident, but he refuses to admit it and represses it so much that he literally forgets about it. Thus, when Brinker organizes the trial and it is proven (with evidence from Leper) that Gene did cause him to fall, it devastates Finny, and he rushes out of the Assembly Room, slips on the marble stairs, breaks his leg, and later, dies. However, if Finny had not denied the truth about evil in others and had openly challenged Gene, then the story would be much different, and Gene would not have gone through the serious mental development that he did. The final example of denial of truth in the story is Gene’s reluctance to acknowledge the evil in him. There are many examples in the story other than Gene pushing Finny out of the tree that show the evil in Gene. Gene feels a lot of resentment towards Finny for all the things that Finny gets away with. One of these things is when Finny wears his pink emblem to school classes. He is questioned by â€Å"the sternest of the Summer Session masters, old Mr. Patch-Withers†, but gets away with it. Gene even admits that Finny’s ability to get out of trouble makes him envious, but claims that it is okay to be jealous of a friend, but the next incident proves otherwise. Finny often wears ties to replace belts, but on the day of the term tea makes the mistake of wearing the school tie as a belt. When Mr. Patch-Withers sees this, Gene â€Å"[becomes] unexpectedly excited† because â€Å"[Finny] wasn’t going to get away with it†. When Finny does not get in trouble, Gene is disappointed and says, â€Å"Phineas was going to get away with even this†. Gene’s reluctance to acknowledge the evil in him is proven later in the book when Leper says that Gene â€Å"? always [was] a savage underneath† and Gene kicks the chair out from underneath him. Gene cannot accept the truth. In this way he is similar to Finny, although the reason why is completely different. Because Gene cannot believe that there is evil in him, he tries to tell himself that everybody else is evil and thinks that everyone is out to get him. Because he believes this, when Finny breaks the school swimming record, and refuses to tell anyone or do it officially, Gene says he is â€Å"too good to be true†. This is because Finny’s behavior contradicts Gene’s perception of Finny as having evil in him and it shocks Gene. Another time when Gene’s true viewpoint is shown is when he asks Finny if he would mind if he got the highest mark in the class. Finny replies, with obvious sarcasm, â€Å"I’d kill myself out of jealous envy†, but Gene takes it completely seriously, and hides his true feelings from Finny. Gene even acknowledges that he does not know everything that there is to know about him and that there are still hidden parts of himself. But he says that these parts could contain â€Å"the Sad Sack, the outcast or the coward†. Gene does not mention the possibility of evil in him here or at any other time before Finny’s death. The good and bad points for this denial of truth are very similar to the ones for the previous example. Although Gene does not suffer for his refusal to accept the evil in him, Finny does, but only when he breaks his leg, and not when he dies. All of these people react to their various crises in different ways. For example, Leper â€Å"[emerged] from a protective cloud of vagueness only to meet it? and so give up the struggle absolutely†, while Brinker â€Å"[develops] a careless general resentment against it†. It is interesting to note that all of the examples of denial of truth in the book end with the character in question facing a total attitude change. Leper becomes partially insane and much more assertive. Gene understands his feelings much better and is a changed person. It is like when Finny died some of his serenity entered Gene. Because he denied the war’s existence, Finny caused Gene to stay away from all their other friends (Brinker, Chet, etc. ) and only talk to him. With Finny’s denying evil in other people it is a little bit more complicated. With each successive fall, it was like Finny’s character fell too. For example, after the first fall, the bitterness in Finny was shown and he also knowingly lies to Gene about the war. After the second fall, however, there is a bigger difference. He attempts to hide his pain at the ? trial’, but after falling again, he can no longer mask his anger with Gene, and shows this when Gene comes to visit him in the night. He tries to attack Gene, but cannot get out of his bed to get near him. Finny has ? fallen’ from his state of perfection and is like a normal person. He does show, however, that he still has the ability to forgive when he sees Gene for the last time.