#4 Ideas about the main character

Within “A Separate Peace,” we find that Gene is a very academic individual.  The entire book is a flashback of his memories of attending Devon so naturally it is a first-person point of view from Gene when he was in school.  Because the future Gene is the narrator, it almost seem like a First person omniscient. The narrator is at least much more omniscient than the school boy Gene.  Throughout the book, Gene compares himself to his best friend Finny numerous times.  At the beginning he believes that he is better than Finny because he was very academic and average in athletics and Finny was terrible in academics and very good at athletics.  However by the end of the book, Gene compares himself in the sense that he thinks that they are both practically the same person.  Because of this difference between the beginning and end of the book,we see that there is a major difference in Gene’s opinion of the relationship between him and Finny.  In the beginning, he thinks that Finny is trying to be better than him by distracting him from school work, but by the end he realizes that Finny was only trying to get him to enjoy life instead of studying all the time.  I particularly like Gene because of his academic ability.  Whenever a really great point is made in the book, its always from Gene and I always enjoy the points that are made.  One point that I find interesting is how Gene described attending Finny’s funeral as attending his own because he thought they were such similar people. One thing that I  don’t like about Gene however is that he is too dependent on others.  Too many times throughout the novel, we find that Gene does exactly what Finny tells him to do.  Gene should have been more independent and made some of his own decisions instead of doing things that Finny wanted him to do like going to the beach.  Gene didn’t want to go and should have made the independent decision to just not go.  He went anyways only because Finny wanted him to.  This is really the only thing that I dislike about Gene.  Overall, Gene is a really interesting character and I like him a lot, and mainly because I almost feel like I can even relate to him.

Fin