Finny
got up from the cot, picking up his cane as an afterthought. He
looked oddly at me, his face set to burst out laughing I thought.
“Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers,”
he came across a few paces, “but I do believe —it’s important
after all for me to believe you.
Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than
anybody.” I waited without saying anything. “And you told me
about Leper, that he’s gone crazy. That’s the word, we might as
well admit it. Leper’s gone crazy. When I heard that about Leper,
then I knew that the war was real, this war and all the wars. If a
war can drive somebody crazy, then it’s real all right. Oh I guess
I always knew,
but I didn’t have to admit it.” He perched his foot, small cast
with metal bar across the bottom to walk on, next to where I was
sitting on the cot. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too
completely sure about you,
when you told me how Leper was. Of course I believed you,” he added
hurriedly, “but you’re the nervous type, you know, and I thought
maybe your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont. I
thought he might not be quite as mixed up as you made out.” Finny’s
face tried to prepare me for what came next. “Then I saw him
myself.”
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John Knowles' A Separate Peace, ch. 1 (pg) 163
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The
hardest part of growing up is realizing that there are in fact people
that you cannot trust. Being young is great because a person can be
naive and think everyone else is innocent too. If only that could be
the case. If only everyone were like Finny -not like him with his
injury and all, but with his personality. As a person grows up, he
finds that even his best friend could be his greatest enemy.
In
this section of the book, Knowles did a beautiful job of giving the
readers a glimpse of the struggle of the two boys as they grow older.
They both struggle to understand their identity. Gene wonders if he
is a bad person. He wonders if he really hated Finny and wished him
to come to ruin, or if it was a casualty. Finny wonders if he can
believe his best friend. He wants to believe him so badly, but he
does not know if he can. He doesn't want to be naive any longer. I
love how he goes through this monologue and says what he does and
does not believe. As he verbalizes his thoughts, he is discovering
even more what he really does believe. He changes his mind as he
goes, determining what others mean to him despite what they have or
have not done. It is a big task, but it is something that every human
goes through when he is a teen. He tries to decipher the truth and
decide not just who he trusts but who he should trust.
