A Separate Peace Persuasive Essay

Every teenager is looking forward to become an adult. Each of them wants to have a house, drive a car, have a family, achieve goals and be independent. Finally, when it’s time for growing up, they understand that, despite all this advantages, there are responsibilities, problems and dilemmas, which have to be solved without anyone’s help. This makes children get scared; they refuse to move on and try to stay as a child as long as they can. Nearly every adult has experienced this fear and harshness of life during growing up and John Knowles greatly visualizes and explains it in his novel, A Separate Peace. The main character, Gene, recalls his school days, which coincide with world war second. Throughout the book Gene is preparing for “war”, which is symbol of adult life. He has a fear of leaving his school and creates for himself separate peace, by help of his friend, Finny. War fear …show more content…
In Devon, there were 2 rivers, one of them called Devon River, which was loved by everyone. It was clear and people enjoyed using it and another, named Naguamsett, which was dirty and muddy, which no one payed attention to. Gene says, “We had never used this lower river, the Naguamsett, during the summer. It was ugly, saline, fringed with marsh, mud and seaweed. A few miles away it was joined to the ocean… It was nothing like the fresh-water Devon above the dam where we’d had so much fun, all the summer.” These 2 rivers can be distinguished as innocence and war. Devon river can be connected to innocent childhood of Gene; the times which were peaceful and separated as this river. Naguamsett, on the contrary, was muddy and uncontrollable, which can be connected to war. Gene once falls in the Naguamsett river and that becomes one of the first interactions of Gene with outer world. From that point Gene’s fear and disgust of war appears and continuous until the end of