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A Separate Peace Attitudes

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The fictional novel ‘A Separate Peace’ by John Knowles is about a boy named Gene and his experiences at Devon School. During the story, World War Two is going on , and Devon School gets more and more involved as the story progresses. The war gradually encroaches and finally dominates life at Devon School, and this is shown by the actions, attitudes, and thoughts of the students. Firstly, some of the actions of the students reflect how much the war has encroached upon the school. Leper is the first to enlist, after watching a movie on the ski troops. “‘I’m going to enlist in these ski troops,’ he went on mildly, so unemphatically that my mind went back to half-listening. Threats to enlist that winter were always declaimed like Blinker’s, with …show more content…
Gene, after getting the idea to enlist from Brinker, thought of the war as a new life and welcomed the idea. “To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life—that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing—I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant, and nothing left in my hands but spools of khaki which could weave only a plain, flat, khaki design, however twisted they might be.” (Knowles, pg.52) Comparing it to the weaving of clothes, Gene’s attitude towards the army was that of a fresh start, no matter how hard or twisted it may be. Though, while the attitudes of the students shows how much the war had impacted them, there are also their thoughts and how they viewed it. Finally, the thoughts some of the students had on the war reflected how much the war had impacted them. Brinker thought of the war as just a way to become a hero, which he didn’t care to be. “‘I’m enlisting,’ he went on, Tm going to ‘serve’ as he puts it, I may even get killed. But I’ll be damned if I’ll have that Nathan Hale attitude of his about it. It’s all that World War

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