John Knowles A Separate peace follows two young men who attend a private high school in New England during world war 2. The main character Gene, is a junior in a time where seniors are being trained to be shipped off for war. His best friend Phineas is a star athlete, while Gene is an above average student. Although the threat of war is always looming around, the boys at the Devon especially Finny and Gene, seem to be caught our in their own world completely separate from the war, hence A Separate Peace. Gene finds himself envying Finny’s talent. One afternoon, while playing around, Gene is tempted to push Finny off the tree and couldn’t come over his impulse and lets Finny fall from the tree. Later on, Finny is enervate and can no longer
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One of the first differences that the audience see is in the very beginning of the novel where Gene is mentioned as revisiting Devon 15 years later and he says that he wants to visit two places, the tree and the marble stairs. Gene says “ I reached a marble foyer and stopped at the foot of a long white marble flight of stairs”(11) and further when he reaches toward the tree he says “This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.”(14). This is a very interesting scene as it gets the readers attention by foreshadowing early in the story but this wasn’t in the movie at all which may be because of the director of the movie was trying not to open the suspense of the movie. Also the novel was told in first person as Gene and whereas the movie was shown in third person, which actually did not bring up what was going in Gene’s head, which could have made the movie more captivating. For instance, when Gene was about to push Finny off the tree in the novel it is seen to be very descriptive and precise, “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step towards him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at
One of the first differences that the audience see is in the very beginning of the novel where Gene is mentioned as revisiting Devon 15 years later and he says that he wants to visit two places, the tree and the marble stairs. Gene says “ I reached a marble foyer and stopped at the foot of a long white marble flight of stairs”(11) and further when he reaches toward the tree he says “This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.”(14). This is a very interesting scene as it gets the readers attention by foreshadowing early in the story but this wasn’t in the movie at all which may be because of the director of the movie was trying not to open the suspense of the movie. Also the novel was told in first person as Gene and whereas the movie was shown in third person, which actually did not bring up what was going in Gene’s head, which could have made the movie more captivating. For instance, when Gene was about to push Finny off the tree in the novel it is seen to be very descriptive and precise, “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step towards him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at