A Separate Peace
Chapter 1: Recap
• Frame Story-stories within a story
– Outer frame: He’s visiting the school fifteen years
after attending.
– Inner frame: He’s an upper middler at the school at
the beginning of WWII.
• Flashback—looking back and telling stories of
past experiences.
– During his visit to the school fifteen years after
attending, he is flashing back to the summer of 1942
and the events that took place that summer.
• Setting—when and where a story takes
place.
– The Devon School
– 1942-1943
– New Hamshire
• Foreshadowing—clues the author gives to
help us predict things that will happen later
in the novel.
• Characters
– Gene; narrator, main character
– Phineas; another main character—athletic and
self-assured.
Chapter 1 Quotable Quotes
• “I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived
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in, which must mean that in the interval I had
succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must
have made my escape from it.
“the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter
years later and find that they are not merely
smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are
absolutely smaller, shrunken by age”
“The more things remain the same, the more they
change after all..Nothing endures, not a tree, not
love, not even a death by violence.”
Chapter 2 Recap
• Foil Characters: a character that contrasts
with another character in order to
highlight specific features of the main
character’s personality.
– Gene vs. Finny
• New Characters:
– Mr. Prud’homme and Mr. Patch-Withers—
substitute head masters for the summer
session.
Chapter 2 Quotable Quotes
• “Bombs in Central Europe were completely unreal
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to use here, not because we couldn’t imagine it—
a thousand newspaper photographs and
newsreels and given us a pretty accurate idea of
such a sight—but because our place here was too
fair for us to accept something like that.
“I was beginning to see that Phineas could get
away with anything.”
“We reminded them what peace was like, of lives
that were not bound up by destruction.”
“The Super Suicide Society of the Summer
Session”
Chapter 3 Recap
• Finny’s set of rules teach us that he doesn’t
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accept defeat.
Blitzball is created—a game made up on the
spot by Finny; he’s a natural at it.
Finny breaks the school swimming record on his
first try; doesn’t want to do it publicly. Shows
the foil characteristics of Gene enjoying every
ounce of positive attention he can get, and Finny
just enjoying the accomplishment.
Chapter 3 Quotable Quotes
• “I wouldn’t have been on that damn limb except
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for him. I wouldn’t have turned around, and so
lost my balance, if he hadn’t been there.”
“It made Finny seem too unusual for-not
friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there
were few relationships among us at Devon not
based on rivalry.”
“stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than
thought, which contains the truth.”
Chapter 4 Recap
• Gene’s doubts and insecurities destroy his
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feelings for Phineas.
He focuses hard on his studies for competitive
value, though he is uninterested in what he
learns.
Gene realizes that Finny just always assumed
that learning came naturally to him, and never
had any intentions on harming his academic
success.
The boys head out to the tree to see if Leper
Lepellier will jump, and Phineas suggests the
two jump together first. Phineas falls from the
tree after Gene jostles the limb a bit.
Chapter 4 Quotable Quotes
• “He was still asleep, although in this drained light he
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looked more dead than asleep.”
“Up like a detonation went the idea of any best friend,
up went affection and partnership and sticking by
someone and relying on someone absolutely in the
jungle of a boys’ school, up went the hope that there
was anyone in this school—in this world—whom I could
trust.”
“I had detected that Finny’s was a den of lonely, selfish
ambition. He was no better than I was, no matter who
won all the contests.”
“He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I
knew there never was and never could have been any
rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.”
Chapter 5 Recap
• Gene is full of guilt and nobody expects him of foul play.
• He dresses up as Finny. He feels that Finny has it
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together and that he is falling apart.
He visits Finny at the infirmary and questions him about
the fall.
Finny suspects him briefly but then says he’ll just have
to wipe those feelings away.
Gene visits Finny over summer vacation and tells Finny
that he deliberately bounced the limb to cause him to
fall.
Finny
Chapter 5 Quotable Quotes
• “I spent as much time as I could alone in our
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room, trying to empty my mind of every
thought, to forget where I was, even who I
was.”
“I was Phineas, Phineas to the life.”
“I deliberately jounced the limb so you would fall
off.”
“It struck me that I was injuring him again. It
occurred to me that this could be an even
deeper injury than what I had done before.”
“You aren’t going to start living by the rules, are
you?”
I grinned at him. “Oh no, I wouldn’t do that,” and
that was the most false thing, the biggest lie of all.