Friday, November 27, 2015

In A Separate Peace, other than the tree incident, are there scenes where Gene is not a character of virtue?

There most certainly are.  Take for example the incident in chapter seven when Brinker confronts Gene in the broiler room.  Brinker starts questioning and hassling Gene over the tree incident.  Gene gets super uncomfortable, tries to lie about what happened, and in then, to take the focus off of him, he lashes out at another kid, humiliating him.  This is not a very virtuous thing to do; he publicly humiliated some innocent bystander just so that Brinker and the other guys would stop bothering him.


Gene also displays quite a bit of selfishness and bitterness in the first few chapters, against Finny.  After Finny confesses his friendship to him on the beach, Gene is silent.  Then, instead of thinking, "Hey, that was a really nice thing of Finny to say," he instead decides that Finny did it on purpose to trick him, because Finny was "trying to undermine" his studies.  Rather petty and unvirtuous if you ask me.


Then, take Gene's behavior with Leper after Leper is discharged from the army.  Leper is in desparate need of friendship and support, and unloads on Gene.  He's been through a traumatic experience, is doubting his sanity, and is super vulnerable.  But instead of being a good friend to Leper, Gene freaks out on him, yells at him, calls him names, and runs away.  Gene behaved  very poorly and was an awful friend to Leper.


I hope that those thoughts helped; good luck!

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