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Identity In Shahram Heshmat's A Separate Peace

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The Question of Identity According to Shahram Heshmat, author of “Basics of Identity”, “Identity is concerned largely with the question: “Who are you?” What does it mean to be who you are? Identity relates to our basic values that dictate the choices we make…”. But sometime within every human being’s life, a situation arises where someone is not able to identify themselves, and because of this they can act strangely and sometimes hostile. In the book, A Separate Peace, four characters who are instrumental to the plot, Gene, Finny, Leper, and Brinker all face what most laymen would identify as an “identity crisis”. But in order to truly evaluate the identity struggle of each of these four characters, one must first identify what an overlying …show more content…

Though each of these identity crises takes place for different reasons, and affects the subject in different ways, all of these crises change the lives and the personalities of the impressionable minds they latch on to. The main character of A Separate Peace, Gene, returns to Devon and tells the story as a flashback, but in reality it seems that Gene is trying to forget the story and his past egregious actions. Notwithstanding, during his stay at Devon, Gene is heavily affected by his own identity crisis as he balances on the edge of hopelessness and happiness. Early within the book, Gene is faced with his willingness to obey Finny, his best friend. Gene desires the charisma of Finny, but he detests the hold that Finny has over him. The divide only grows as Finny flaunts his success in Gene’s face and begins to compete with Gene, or at least that is what Gene believes. In reality, Finny has changed nothing about his personality or his

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