In John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, the author focuses on the painful and sometimes difficult transition to adulthood in an adolescent character named Gene Forrester. Gene has a nonconformist friend called Phineas, or Finny, who is extremely physically talented, but does not do well in school. Gene, on the other hand, is very conventional, does well in school, and always follows the rules. He becomes intensely jealous of Finny’s athletic talent and makes him fall out of a tree and shatter his leg. Finny is crippled for life, and will never return to playing the sports he loved so much and excelled at. After the incident, Gene realizes that Finny was never jealous of him, and the rest of the novel shows how various characters try to cope with
