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A Separate Peace By John Knowles: Character Analysis

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In John Knowles’ novel, A Separate Peace, Finny stays at home for a short time while the winter session at the Devon school begins. New characters are introduced into the novel, helping to provoke Gene as he is trying to figure out who he is as a person. Brinker Hadley is one of the new characters who is smart and well put together despite his age. Brinker is more focused on politics and government issues rather than sports. Brinker is is six feet tall and he tends to present himself to a high esteem by wearing a suit everyday, having the best grades, and just being someone that people always talk about. Despite this, he begins to test his boundaries with Gene by trying to find the truth about what might have really happened when Finny fell off the tree. I think Brinker is doing this so that he can maybe get Gene in trouble with the Masters at Devon or to just make him feel guiltier about what had happened. Brinker even mentions, “‘I’ll bet you knew all the time Finny wouldn’t be back this fall. That’s why you picked him for a roommate, right’” (Knowles 88). Brinker tries to make Gene feel that he had planned this to happen in order to achieve getting a room to himself. This makes Gene feel worse about the situation and he begins to take Finny’s personality and his overall disposition. Gene continues to be questioned about how …show more content…

The author does this to help add to the pressure on Gene to tell the truth or to deal with the lie that he made up. In addition, this almost blows the incident out of proportion and this situation almost becomes more stretched out than what it really needed to be. I think Brinker did this so that he could also get the attention of the other boys since it had seemed like he was trying to be the center of attention all along and this was a way to achieve

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