A Separate Peace Book

I am writing this letter to inform you on reasons why I would recommend your book, A Separate Peace. After reading A Separate Peace, this book is surely one of the best books I ever read. Its interesting story line that is very easy to follow kept me curious on what was happening next. A Separate Peace’s beauty, vitality and purpose will keep every reader extremely interested. I would highly recommend this novel to young adults. I was very interested in the story’s beauty.

You gave me a more detailed view on the fact that you can find a friendship in anyone, and it’s very important to understand the solidarity and the very magnitude of a good friend. Also, I was very attracted to your use of symbolism from different objects to represent the relations to the characters. The quote, “He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he. I couldn’t stand this…

Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud. It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten” (Knowles 153), signifies the climax of the novel.

Gene finally does something to potentially hurt Finny. However, what he realizes is that Finny was never trying to compete with him, that what he truly always wanted was a friendship, nothing more, nothing less. Also, the quote explains that it is Gene’s first clumsy action, which makes him seem superior to Finny, but actually isn’t. I believe that this proves that Gene feels extremely lower than Finny, which probably caused him to jounce the limb and have Finny fall off to his bad luck.

I feel people don’t really know who their best friends are until they really look upon what someone has on the inside. When it comes to friendship, there could be “A Separate Peace” in someone that is completely different and you proved that very well. What else made me so interested was the story’s vitality. The vitality of the story was interesting because it shows how jealousy can ruin friendships but also people learn and grow from this. Also, the characters were never in a stable state of reality. You used the energetic style of ocial constructivism , where people create their own reality, to form a “separate peace” from war (disagreement) to the Winter Carnival (peace) created in the story, similar to the same concept of the film Fight Club directed by David Fincher. I believe your use of this kind of style was very complicated to understand prior to finishing the novel; but once I was done reading it, I understood the concept of your use of symbolism to show how the different objects and time periods relate to the characters lifestyle.

Finally, the most significant and interesting part of the novel – the purpose. Most people might disagree with the purpose of the novel, since the social constructivism was difficult to understand. We all have different approaches for the novel’s purpose. Some might believe that the purpose was to get a visual on the separations of friends as we get older and how we see people for their true colors. I believe that the purpose was the characters were eating for the company of someone else to feel complete, but in order to be happy with others, they had to be happy with themselves.

That’s what Gene couldn’t understand until the death of Finny. The quote, “I did not cry when I stood watching him being lowered into the family’s strait-laced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that it was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case” (Knowles 194), proves how close Gene felt to Finny, even at his death. Gene’s feeling that it is his own funeral explains he has lost a part of himself; it is clear that Finny and Gene had become very close. He will never be the same without Finny by his side.

I believe young adults will find this story very interesting. From its easy to follow story line, its views and numerous of lessons taught , young adults can relate to this novel. I believe this story will continue to be popular since it was republished 4 times since the most recent publishing in 1996. Also, others have been inspired by this story such as Meg Rosoff’s 2007 novel What I Was. My one question that I ask is thou many readers have different opinions about the novel’s purpose, what is the original purpose you explained?