"Those Who Wish to Stay the Same Change the Most After All" a Separate Peace: Transformation Motif

A Separate Peace: Transformation Motif It is important to confront reality, no matter how harsh it is. People will always face difficult situations, but avoiding them is often more dangerous than the situation itself. In his novel, A Separate Peace, Knowles explores what can happen when a person or even an institution tries to avoid painful circumstances. In the story, Gene, the protagonist, and his friends are students at the Devon boarding school; and the troubling issues they face are wars, the external, World War II, and the intimate conflicts that often arise between close friends. Knowles uses the motif of the transformation of Devon, Finny, and Gene to show the importance of confronting head-on the wars within and around them. Devon boarding school shields Gene and his classmates from the hardships of World War II. Gene’s class, the “Upper Middlers,” are too young for the draft. This causes the teachers at Devon to see them as the last evidence of “the life the war was being fought to preserve” (29). The teachers are afraid to expose the boys to the terror of war and so they hide it from them. While throughout the country, others participate in the war effort, Gene and his classmates remain apart and spend their time “calmly reading Virgil” (24). Because of this separation, the war becomes “completely unreal” (24) to the Upper Middlers. The entire world appears to be churning in the upheaval of the war, but Devon tries to remain the same, shielding the boys from its hardships. Unfortunately, when the effects of the war inevitably come to Devon, its attempts at avoidance result in a negative transformation with bitter and unintended consequences. In its efforts to deny the war’s existence, Devon changes from idyllic and relaxed in the Summer Session to rigid and uncompromising in the Winter Session. In the summer at Devon, the boys play games on the “healthy green turf brushed with dew” to the calming sounds of “cricket noises and the bird cries of

Cited: Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.