Correlation Of Friendship Between Gene And Finny In A Separate Peace By John Knowles

In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, he plagues the friendship of Gene and Finny with competition. Through the glimpses of Gene’s memory, Knowles shows the intertwining of competiveness and friendship because of jealously and envy. In several episodes of Gene’s memory, like Finny and Gene’s arguments, the winter carnival, and the trial, Knowles expresses the difficulty of separating friendship from competitiveness. Throughout John Knowles’ novel, the friendship between Finny and Gene is jeopardized by their constant want to be better than the other, through competition. Throughout the novel, Gene is constantly comparing himself to Finny, over exaggerating the competition between them, which has detrimental effects on their relationship. Gene creates the goal of being valedictorian to provide an accomplishment to compete with Phineas’ athletic achievements. He believes that
When Brinker is asking questions about what happened at the tree, the “competitive look left [Phineas’] face” (169) as he realized the conversation they were having. Even though Finny claims to have not known that he was pushed it is clear that he was in denial because Gene had tried to tell him several times before that he was responsible. Both Finny and Gene then mix up the details of the story to save each other for different reasons: Gene from being guilty of injuring Finny and Finny from the psychological effects of his best friend intentionally hurting him. The unhealthy competition among the friends finally escapes them when Gene admits that it “was just some ignorance inside me… something blind” (191) that causes Gene to push Finny out of the tree; it was no longer the want to get rid of the competition that he so intensely believed before. Phineas’ acceptance of Gene’s apology emphasizes how they left behind their competition for something that was worth more to them: their