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A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is John Knowles's crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic.

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A Different time, a Different Place

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This book is one of several that is most memorable from my youth. The main character is one that you easily like, his spirit is pure. Like Siddhartha he has his Govinda who follows him around. The spirit that the main character embodies is what makes this book special to me, that and the fact that it is set at Andover or Exeter, which ever one, during a more innocent time. This book to me is about innocence. Innocence is wonderful, people like that exist in the world. I think it is OK to fall in love with fictional characters to some extent. Maybe you will too. I highly recommend this book.

Schoolbook

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You can see this title on the required summer reading tables in bookstores, and I guess schools have been assigning it for almost fifty years. It is easy to see why. Its characters are all adolescents, engaged in the usual struggle for self-definition, subject to sudden mood-swings between intense affection and crippling self-doubt. And being set in 1942-43, the years following America's entry into the War, it offers a new and valuable perspective on this important period in the nation's history. It is, in short, a teachable text. But it is a text that requires teaching. For one thing, I am not sure how easily most young people can relate to the hermetic world of a single-sex boarding school, let alone an elite New England prep school (the Dover School of the book is surely modeled after Philips Exeter, which the author attended). Although there is no hint of the homoerotic attractions that were a significant issue at the similar English school I attended a decade later, the book demands some understanding of the emotional impact of a closed world, where one's friends are everything, and every feeling is intensified. The central character, Gene Forrester, though physically no slouch, is primarily a scholar; he is drawn into the magnetic ambience of his roommate Phineas (Finny), a natural athlete for whom no feat is impossible and no scheme too audacious. The plot turns on Gene's inability to discern his own motives, or even to work out whether Finny is his best friend or most jealous rival. A moment of ambiguity early in the novel triggers an event which, though apparently soon laid to rest, will resonate throughout the book, leading to much more serious consequences. A good teacher might profitably discuss questions of truth and perception, motive and blame, on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but Knowles is a subtle and balanced writer who avoids primary colors. The lone reader who does not stop to question the text might well be left with the impression that this is merely an elegant memoir in which little of consequence happens. The title phrase occurs about two-thirds of the way through the book during an unofficial Winter Carnival that Finny has organized in the snowy fields: "It wasn't the cider that made me surpass myself, 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." The peace really is momentary; the very next paragraph introduces the first Devon casualty of the war, not fatal but nearly as devastating. Indeed, the war has been almost imperceptibly in the background for some time, but it now moves to the foreground, as the members of the graduating class move to enlist in one of the services. In the epilogue, Knowles has Gene take the war as a metaphor for the psychological battles fought at school over the past year. I am not certain that this works. But the brief moment when the two worlds, school and war, are temporarily balanced against one another is very poignant indeed.

The Nihilist Proposition: Negative & Repugnant

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/ "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles is a confusing book, which is why it is endorsed for popular consumption. The reason is that when values are confused, people are far more readily manipulated; moreso, than if they were presented with a story whose propositions by way of story line were more explicit and unconfusing. The novel has nothing at all to do with PEACE, but a lot to do with ANGST, which the author offers as a desireable personality trait. The first element in the story is its SELF-ABSORBED tone. The random presentation of events, and the fact that the actions of the characters are not founded upon human IDEATION, creates a perfect scenario for an elaborate HALF-TRUTH to be imposed upon the reader. The characters wander through a labyrinth of activities which are meaningless, purposeless, and thoughtless. It's a social engineer's paradise. In this labyrinth of literary devices Knowle's presents a camouflaged ideation, which is incomplete of course, because the author is offering characters that are conveniently unhinged from reality. This disconnection permits the dialogue to float adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Unfortunately, the uncertainty is presented as an invariable, and certitude simply isn't there. What remains is a nihilistic proposition in which people navigate a foggy landscape, with no place to go, and nothing particular to do but wallow around in a teleological No Man's land. The novel has appeal to people who endorse such propositions, finding fuzzy meanings and messages in the vaccuous verbiage; but that is precisely the author's intention. There is virtually no value in reading such literature, unless one is merely curious about how nihilistic messages are implanted in the collective psyche, and how human Egotism and self-centeredness become a general proposal as a basis upon which to found a life. In all, it is literary nonsense, whose potential damage to the human psyche is evident to anyone with an ability to sort through the author's manipulations of logic in storyline and dialogue. It's rather like a "code" in scripted form, with no benefit, unless the reader views as a benefit, fictionalized melodrama and fictionalized crises. As the proverbialism goes, John Knowles doesn't have anything I want. --Bruce R. Bain /

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