A Separate Peace

Immediately, Finny critiques Gene’s clothing. He calls an army fatigue shirt that Gene is wearing—a gift from his older brother—“very topical” (116). Despite the crutches leaning against his desk, Finny does not seem unwell. Finny carps about the lack of maid service, and Gene reminds him that “there’s a war on” (116), judging Finny for complaining about luxuries. Gene makes Finny’s bed for him, and Finny does not balk at the help. With the lights out, Finny talks, as is his habit before falling asleep. He wakes Gene up in the morning with another complaint about the missing maids. Gene hands him his crutches, realizing that each new day is not a fresh beginning, as the issues of the night before do not disappear during sleep. However, this does not seem to be Finny’s attitude.

Brinker appears and begins to ask Gene if he’s ready to go enlist, and then notices that Finny has returned. Brinker jokes that Gene’s “little plot didn’t work so well after all” (118). Finny demands to know what Brinker is talking about, and Gene deflects. He tells Finny that Brinker is asking if Gene will enlist with him, since they are seventeen years old. Shocked, Finny questions them, and Brinker admits that they had discussed enlisting that day. Finny announces that he is taking a shower, refusing any help offered. Gene notes that Finny is surprised because he needs Gene, even if Gene “was the least trustworthy person he had ever met” (118). He feels his “dreams of enlistment and escape and a clean start” (118) dissipating. Gene calls Brinker’s idea of enlisting “nutty” (118), and Brinker responds defensively before grinning back. The three joke about enlisting, and Finny quips, “‘He wouldn’t enlist with you […] if you were Madam Chiang Kai-shek’” (122). Gene responds that Brinker “really is Madam Chiang Kai-shek” (122), which earns Brinker the nickname “The Yellow Peril” (122).

The discussion, which derails Gene’s thoughts of enlisting right away, delays what Gene describes as the war “eroding the peaceful summertime stillness” (122) on the Devon campus. But, Gene muses, this delay is only temporary. Around Devon, the snow and ice offer a multitude of opportunities for Finny to injure himself while moving around on crutches. Even the insides of the school buildings, with their marble floors, invite potential accidents. Gene helps Finny around campus, remembering how his friend used to walk: “in continuous flowing balance, so that he had seemed to drift along with no effort at all, relaxation on the move” (125). Although Dr. Stanpole told Gene that Finny would walk again, Gene doubts he will ever walk like he did. Suddenly, Finny suggests that they skip class. Gene reminds him that it is his first day back, but Finny says that he wants to go to the gymnasium instead.

After a quarter-mile trek, Gene notices that Finny, who is sweating and shaking, is not as strong as he pretends. Before they enter, Finny takes a moment to regain his strength “so that he could go in with a show of energy” (125). First, they pass the trophy room, where Gene expects Finny to go and view his trophies in order “to mull over these lost glories” (125). He even prepares to console Finny if this is the case. Instead, Finny heads into the locker room. Finny sits, commenting, “‘Same old place, isn’t it?’” (125). Gene replies, “‘Not exactly’” (125). Finny insists that Gene will become Devon’s new star athlete, responding angrily when Gene admits that he didn’t try out for any sports and isn’t even assistant managing the rowing team anymore.

Gene defends his choice, asserting that, with the war, teams won’t be taking trips and adding, “‘I don’t know, sports don’t seem so important with the war on’” (128). Finny asks, “‘Have you swallowed all of that war stuff?’” (128). When Gene expresses confusion at the question, Finny states, “‘Don’t be a sap. […] There isn’t any war’” (128). Gene tells Finny that he must still be on some sort of drug, and Finny claims, “‘No, you are. Everybody is’” (128). Finny proceeds to explain that in the 1920s, Prohibition just caused everyone to drink even more, so the “preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts […] got desperate and arranged the Depression” (128). Similarly, the war was invented as a ruse by “fat old men” to keep young people from “crowding them out of their jobs” (128). Gene tells Finny, “‘I hope you don’t play this game too much with yourself. You might start to believe it and then I’d have to make a reservation for you at the Funny Farm’” (128). Finny replies that “the whole world is on a Funny Farm now. But it’s only the fat old men who get the joke” (128). And Finny, because he has suffered.

After a moment, Gene jumps up and, “in a fumbling and perhaps grotesque offering to Finny” (128), grabs an exercise bar. Finny tells Gene to do thirty chin-ups, which is far more than he has ever done. As Finny counts aloud, he becomes more and more energized. Finally, Finny admits that before the fall, he was working toward becoming an Olympic athlete. And since he won’t be in shape for the 1944 Olympics, Finny declares that he will train Gene instead. Gene protests that with the war, there will be no 1944 Olympics, but Finny retorts, “‘Leave your fantasy life out of this’” (131). So Gene decides to go along with Finny, although he has no doubt that the war is happening. However, the war is so far away that it seems two-dimensional. Gene notes that it feels like an excuse for the faculty to drive them harder and for the cafeteria to feed them chicken livers. Although he doesn’t believe Finny’s outlandish ideas, Gene also doubts the stories that valorize the war.

As Gene helps Finny with his studies and Finny helps Gene with his athletic training, both boys make progress. One morning, while running with Finny watching, Gene suddenly finds that he feels good rather than exhausted. When the boys return to the dorm, Mr. Ludsbury meets them at the door, suspiciously asking why Gene is training. Finny insists that Gene is preparing for the 1944 Olympics, and Ludsbury laughs, replying that “[g]ames are all right in their place” but “all exercise today is aimed of course at the approaching Waterloo” (134). He suggests that Gene focus on that instead, and Finny tells Ludsbury no. Furiously, Ludsbury walks away, and Finny comments that he must not know that the war is fake because he isn’t fat enough. 

As Gene spends more time training with Finny, the war continues to feel unreal, even though Gene doesn’t believe Finny’s claim that the war is actually a ruse. This does not change when Leper Lepellier enlists. A recruiter comes to campus and shows the boys a video of the United States ski troops, and Leper immediately decides that he wants to join. Although Leper had previously claimed that skiing is not meant to be fast, the video shows him that the sport had to adapt to the war in order to stay relevant. Leper enlists a week before his eighteenth birthday, when he would have been registered for the draft and would no longer have any choice whether or not to enlist. Once he is gone, Brinker reads an article aloud in the smoking room about a supposed attempt on Hitler’s life, and tells the other boys, “‘That was Leper, of course’” (141). This leads to the creation of a wild mythology about Leper’s whereabouts and heroic deeds. Finny refuses to participate and instead scolds Gene, as an athlete, for smoking at all.

Gene and Finny become more isolated in their training. As the grayness of winter wears on, Finny refuses to find the weather depressing. Instead, he suggests that they organize a Winter Carnival. Finny makes plans and assigns duties, forgetting momentarily that Leper has left school. Although Finny manages to make the carnival happen, the boys in their dorm are apathetic. Brinker, for instance, has been less invested in school activities since Gene derailed their plans to enlist. Brinker, who has resigned from all of his school organizations and leadership positions, expresses doubt in whether the winter is a reason to celebrate with a carnival. Gene comments that this is the first thing Finny has wanted to work on since returning, and Brinker agrees to help.

On the day of the carnival, the boys, led by Brinker, sneak equipment to the riverbank, including jugs of hard cider. Brinker leaves his roommate, Brownie Perkins, in charge of guarding everything “with his life. He meant this literally, and Brownie knew it” (144). After spending the day in terror that he would suddenly have to abandon his post, Brownie returns to the dorm, too tired to take part in the festivities. A stolen classroom table is laden with makeshift prizes: among other things, Finny’s icebox, “a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary with all the most stimulating words marked” (147), a copy of the Iliad that includes a handwritten English translation, a “forged draft registration card, and $4.13 from the Headmaster’s Discretionary Benevolent Fund” (147), which the boys decide not to question. At the table, Finny is seated in a rolling chair carved with two lions’ heads, an impulse purchase for the occasion.

Another boy, Chet Douglass, has brought his trumpet. There are snow sculptures meant to resemble some of the prominent authority figures at the school. The boys prepare a ski jump. With everything set, Brinker prompts Finny to preside over the carnival, asking, “‘What’s next?’” (147). Finny responds, “‘Next? Well that’s pretty clear. You are’” (147). With a trumpet blast by Chet, the boys swarm over Brinker, who is protecting the jugs of cider. Extricating himself from the pack of boys, Brinker declares that the games have begun, but Finny insists that it’s impossible to begin the games without “the sacred fire of Olympus” (150). Finny sacrifices the Iliad to the fire and exclaims that the games are open. The carnival is a festival of debauchery, and the boys, drunk on cider and excitement, are wild. Amid the events, Brownie arrives with a telegram for Gene. The telegram is from Leper and reads, “I have escaped and need help. I am at Christmas location. You understand. No need to risk address here. My safety depends on your coming at once” (153). 

Gene knows immediately that “Christmas location” refers to Leper’s home in Vermont. Gene makes the journey, noting that the trip is a precursor to the similar trips he will take when he is in the military. Although Gene will never be shipped overseas, he is moved around the country, training for “a mass assault against suicidally-defended Japan” (154)—an attack that will never occur because the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima end the war. In essence, the bombs save the lives of Gene and the boys of his year, many of whom would have likely become casualties of an assault on Japan. Gene considers Leper’s claim that he “escaped,” convincing himself that Leper must mean that he escaped from some sort of enemy forces or spies, since no one escapes from the army.

When Gene reaches Leper’s house in Vermont, it is dawn, and Leper is standing in the front window, watching Gene approach. Leper invites Gene into the dining room, commenting that he spends most of his time there because the dining room is predictable. Without fail, there are three meals a day in the dining room. Leper is different from the boy Gene knew at Devon. He is anxious and quick to rage, and seems to have difficulty controlling his volume and facial expressions. Gene asks when Leper has to return from his furlough, and Leper retorts that he is not on furlough. Leper went AWOL because he was facing a Section 8 discharge, which is “for the nuts in the service, the psychos, the Funny Farm candidates” (159). With a Section 8 discharge, Leper will be marked for the rest of his life. It will be essentially impossible for him to find a job.

Leper accuses Gene of being “a swell guy, except when the chips were down. You always were a savage underneath” (159). Then Leper adds, “‘Like that time you knocked Finny out of the tree’” (159). Incensed, Gene leaps up, kicking Leper’s chair out from beneath him. Leper curls up on the floor, laughing and crying, and Leper’s mother enters to see what caused the noise. Immediately, Gene apologizes, explaining that Leper “said something crazy” (159), and he reacted, forgetting that “there’s something the matter with his nerves, isn’t there?” (159). Leper’s mother helps her son off the floor, and Gene moves to go, but she asks him to stay for lunch. Contrite, Gene agrees, eating everything placed in front of him by way of extended apology.

After lunch, Leper’s mother suggests that the two boys take a walk. Leper tells Gene that he was, in army vernacular, “nervous in the service” (163). Awkwardly, Gene points out that that sounds like one of Brinker’s poems. At the mention of Brinker, Leper becomes angry again, calling him a “bastard” and starting, once again, to sob. Leper admits that he doesn’t hate Brinker more than anyone else, but that in the service he had begun to hallucinate strange things. Leper was hungry all the time but unable to eat the food in the Mess Hall. Although he was exhausted, he couldn’t sleep at night because his bunkmate coughed constantly. Leper describes the moment that he hallucinated his corporal morphing into a woman, and how he screamed and was dragged off by his arms and legs. Gene cuts him off, unwilling to listen to any more. He leaves Leper standing there, “telling his story to the wind” (166).