Friendship offers numerous blessings that enrich life. A good friend makes happy days brighter and sad days more tolerable by demonstrating loyalty, optimism, and a spirit of adventure. Loyalty is staying faithful to a friend through both good and bad times. Optimism is looking on the bright side no matter how bad the situation may be. An adventurous spirit is being willing to take risks and try new things. A Separate Peace’s Phineas clearly embodies all of these traits, proving him to be a great friend.
Loyalty is vital to a good friendship because it eliminates the fear of being left all alone. With loyalty comes trust and acceptance, which are necessary to create a lasting bond between friends. At the end of chapter two, Gene begins to lose his balance on the branch and immediately becomes panicked. (Core 1) Finny is so loyal that he reaches out to Gene and helps him steady himself, saving his life. (Core 41) As Finny saves Gene, good friends are willing to save each other when they feel as if they may fall out of the symbolic tree. (Core 12)
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(Core 22) Embracing the goodness in a situation rather than focusing on the bad aspects proves to be a policy carried out by optimists. Rather that whining about the increased difficulty he has while moving around in the snow with his broken leg, Phineas tells his friends about his love for winter. Finny even dances around at the winter carnival and starts a snowball fight, despite the trouble his leg is causing him. While most people would feel depressed by the limit of only one functional leg, Finny looks past his physical restriction and makes the best out of the unfortunate situation. As Phineas keeps a positive outlook, so too should good friends. It has been said that people are influenced by the friends they spend the most time with, making an optimist a great person to
While he was meeting everyone he met his soon to be best friend, Finny. After a while of getting Gene all settle in Finny’s wanted to hang out with him to get to know him. The boys found a tree and wanted to jump out of it into the lake. On this day they knew that they were going to be best friends. “We were the best of friends at that moment” (Knowles, pg 18)
In life, a true friend is considered to be one of the most important things a person can have. Sometimes friends get in trouble, and when they do it’s your responsibility to help them. The soldier from Panos Ioannides’ story “Gregory” and Ronnie Quiller from Joseph Whitehill’s “The Day of the Last Rock Fight” both have friends that they constantly try to keep out of trouble. When in trouble, a friend will do everything in their power to assist you.
Gene considers Finny to be his best friend. In this type of friendship there is an implied vow of trust, loyalty and sense of forever friendship "Finny could shine with everyone, he attracted everyone he met. I was glad of that too. Naturally. He was my roommate and my best friend" (Knowles 40).
In John Knowles novel, A Separate Peace, he used many literary devices and techniques to bring across a major theme of the book, friendship. Without all of these literary techniques, the novel would have been a mundane and bland read, but instead, he turned the book into an exciting adventure of two friends full of underlying meaning. The first major technique he used is the symbolization of weather, as every season represented something new and different. Mr. Knowles also used the approach of a first person point of view, in which Gene narrated the entire story as a flashback.
Many people think of their best friends, and they are happy to see them, want to do things with them, and are just generally glad to have them around. However, in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, this is not the case with friends Phineas and Gene. In this novel, Knowles uses the protagonist, Gene forrester, to help show how betrayal can ruin friendships.
Part of friendship consists of accepting a friend's shortcomings. This theme, generally associated with A Separate Peace, means that friends should embrace each other's imperfections. Some people seem perfect with no flaws at all while others seem hopelessly imperfect with many flaws, but the truth is everyone makes mistakes. Friends should accept each other's shortcomings because unrealistic expectations can damage a relationship. In A Separate Peace, both Finny and Gene had difficulty accepting a friend's shortcomings.
Gene and Finny are the main characters in this story, they teach you a lot about their friendship. Finny and Gene’s friendship can be described by their rivalry and loyalty, betrayal and guilt, and confession and forgiveness. The first stage of Finny and Gene’s friendship is loyalty and rivalry. Gene usually does what Finny wants to do.
Differences in A Separate Peace Novel and Film Everyone at some point has felt envious of their bestfriend. In the novel, “A Separate Peace”, envy leads to many problems and changes in the film. Phineas is a main character that is bestfriends with Gene; he is athletic, a leader, and goes by Finny. Leper is a student that is viewed as weird. When he came back from the war he is portrayed differently in the film than in the book.
Finny wore a pink shirt and used the Devon School tie as his belt to the traditional term tea for the Upper Middle class. Mrs. Patch-Withers noticed and Finny quickly came up with a convincing story to possibly get himself out of trouble. Gene thinks Finny will be busted and reacts by saying, “I could feel myself becoming unexpectedly excited at that” (Knowles 12). This quote shows the beginning of the envy Gene feels toward Finny. Gene is somewhat looking forward to the possibility of Finny getting in trouble for the first time.
What is a friend? A common response to this question seems to be someone who accepts another for who they are. Another less used response to the same question is someone who leave another better than they once were. These two half definitions of friendship come to gather to explain that friend is someone who takes another how they already are and leaves that better than their previous state. True friendship often adds loyalty to ones character resulting in acts of courage.
In A Separate Peace Phineas (Finny) and Gene become a model of codependency. At the start of A Separate Peace Gene expresses envy and resentment towards Finny. Finny’s physical abilities in sports lead Gene to feel it necessary to accentuate his intellectual abilities in school. Gene’s need quickly turns into a one sided competition against Finny, until Finny falls out of a tree breaking his leg, exposing Gene’s darker feelings towards his best friend. Now rather than envy fueling Finny and Gene’s relationship, it quickly becomes fueled by their codependency on each other.
Friendship A Separate Peace has a very unique description of friendship. Throughout the book, Gene is jealous of Finny’s looks and what he is able to do. Gene has a lot of ambivalent feelings toward Finny. He wants to be Finny, but at the same time he is jealous of him.
In Scott Russell Sanders’s essay, “The Most Human Art: Ten Reasons Why We’ll Always Need A Good Story,” indicates that stories “educate our desires.” this power is shown multiple times in Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, where the bond between Eragon and his dragon Saphira, educate people how strong friendship can do to people’s lives. The theme of friendship is shown in many sections of the book but there are many sections that is very significant to readers to understand the bond between the 2 characters and how helpful it can be to someone. It was as if an unbreakable pact were being sealed.
In literature Christ figures are often used literary technique. A Christ figure is a martyr who sacrifices themselves for the betterment of those around him. In the novels A Separate Peace, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the movie Cool Hand Luke, Phineas, Mcmurphy, and Luke are all prime examples of Christ figures. The novel A Separate Peace follows the story of best friends, Gene and Phineas.
“A true friend accepts who you are and helps you become who you should be.” Steve and Nathaniel proved that friendship and happiness can be real in the novel The Soloist by Steve Lopez. The way friendship is portrayed in the novel is unexpected in such a way that we don’t see it happen often in our daily life. It is important to our society because finding a true friend is really difficult to find. True friendship is hard to find now in days because we expect many things in return from other people.