A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

I know that T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

For instance: Is A Separate Peace a seminal queer novel, or is it a book about the sublime quality of adolescent friendship?

Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, another book often seen as queer despite the author’s insistence that it is not.

If you find yourself wondering about the nature of the relationship between Phineas and Gene, you are experiencing through art something that is key to many people’s experience of queerness: uncertainty.

However, queer people have historically found themselves in literature by reading between the lines, filling in gaps.

As with the zany characters in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the humor dissipates as the reader realizes these characters aren’t wacky but traumatized.

His memory is unreliable, despite its sparkling clarity.

This is the crux of the novel, perhaps: the idea that it is in anticipating evil that we are most likely to commit evil ourselves.

But perhaps that is too simplistic, too neat. It could be the thesis statement of a student essay. If there is a moral to the novel, it can’t be summarized so easily.

A Separate Peace is a novel that belongs wholly to its reader. It refuses to be analyzed definitively. That

Perhaps the school wasn’t as well kept up in those days; perhaps varnish, along with everything else, had gone to war.

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought,

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact.

ell

salient

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like this? Was he getting some kind of hold over me?

“It’s you, pal,” Finny said to me at last, “just you and me.”

a loud phonograph a long way off played Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, rejected that and played They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,

grew more ambitious with The Warsaw Concerto, mellower with The Nutcracker Suite, and then stopped.

Hardy assignments; I was halfway through Tess of t...

he carried on his baffled struggle with Far from t...

Everything he said was true and sincere; Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this stunned people then he was surprised.

We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve.

“I wonder what would happen if I looked like a fairy to everyone.” “You’re nuts.”

“Well, in case suitors begin clamoring at the door, you can tell them I’m wearing this as an emblem.”

It was hypnotism. I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything.

I couldn’t help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little.

He had gotten away with everything. I felt a sudden stab of disappointment. That was because I just wanted to see some more excitement; that must have been it.

He got away with everything because of the extraordinary kind of person he was. It was quite a compliment to me, as a matter of fact, to have such a person choose me for his best friend.

He forced compliance by leaning against me as we walked along, changing my direction;

Bombs in Central Europe were completely unreal to us here, not because we couldn’t imagine it—a thousand newspaper photographs and newsreels had given us a pretty accurate idea of such a sight—

but because our place here was too fair for us to accept something like that.

We spent that summer in complete selfishness, I...

Rigid, I began climbing the rungs, slightly reassured by having Finny right behind me. “We’ll jump together to cement our partnership,”

Another was, “Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.”

Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport. Nothing bad ever happened in sports; they were the absolute good.

At dawn, all day long, and at midnight, Phineas always had a steady and formidable flow of usable energy.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.

To waste anything in America is immoral.

There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.

The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors risk being unpatriotic.

how……

The Devon School record books contained a mistake, a lie, and nobody knew it but Finny and me.

Despite the steady musical undertone in his speaking voice Finny couldn’t carry a tune, and he couldn’t remember the melody or the words to any song.

I noticed that people were looking fixedly at him, so I took a look myself to see why.

but after all you can’t come to the shore with just anybody and you can’t come by yourself,

and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal.”

He hesitated and then added, “which is what you are,” and there was...