Compare And Contrast A Separate Peace

Thud! Gene looks down and sees a body just laying there with no move. Gene Forrester is the protagonist of the novel “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles and has some conflict just as he’s getting comfortable in his new school, Devon. Elwin (Leper) Lepellier is a minor character who is known as the social outcast of the school. Throughout the book, Gene and Phineas (Finny) become best friends and their friendship takes its toll on each of them. Due to the main conflict of the story, Gene’s jealousy of Finny, Gene causes Finny to fall off of their favorite tree shattering Finny’s leg. Even after this fall, Gene loses his best friend to another fall down a marble stairwell when Finny left the mock trial they held to find out the truth about the accident in the tree. Gene views the loss of Finny as a lesson to be learned and Finny as the best teacher he’s ever had. The novel “A Separate Peace” and the movie based on it have key differences, some of which are the beginning of the story, Leper’s character, and the …show more content…
The novel begins with an older Gene visiting the places where most of the climaxes occurred such as the tree and the marble stairwell. At the start of the book Gene tells us, "... I was a student there fifteen years before" (Knowles 9). This quote shows the reader that Gene is speaking fifteen years after he was a student at Devon, this also shows that almost the whole story in the novel is a flashback. Compared to the movie where Brinker states "It's Gene's own trial..." (Yates 3:09). This quote shows that the movie began with the mock trial as opposed to the beginning of the novel which starts with an older Gene setting up the scene for the rest of the story. Therefore the beginning of the novel of "A Separate Peace" is different because the novel begins with Gene having a flashback compared to the movie where it starts with Gene's mock