Sample Essay
An Internal War
At the end of John Knowles’ novel A Separate Peace, the narrator Gene states, “….my war ended
before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there” (205).
The fact that Gene believes his war ended before he actually became a part of the military suggests his
war differs from the war, World War II, which occupies the rest of the characters. Furthermore, his
enemy is killed at Devon, the school he attends in his youth, suggesting that the battle Gene wages is
not against some unnamed, foreign solider but against a more intimate companion. While it might be
tempting to consider Phineas, the boy Gene alternatively revers and distrusts, who Gene irreparably
maims in a fit of jealously, and who eventually dies as a result of complications associated with that
injury, as Gene’s enemy, this conclusion is undermined by Gene’s final words. The last words in the
novel clearly venerate Phineas by separating him from all of Gene’s other classmates. He says, “All of
them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this
enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who ever attacked that way—if he
attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy” (205). Gene’s enemy is a foe shared by the rest of his
schoolmates, excluding only Phineas, and yet their enemy seems, to a certain extent, invisible. Indeed, it
seems even the very existence of this enemy is in question: “…this enemy they thought they saw….if he
was indeed the enemy” (205). Such comments seem to suggest that the war Gene and his peers fight is
against an intangible foe, an internal enemy: their own fear, hatred, and jealousy. Gene substantiates
this theory when he states, “I was ready for the war now, now that I no longer had any hatred to
contribute to it. My fury was gone, I felt it gone, dried up at the source, withered and lifeless. Phineas
had absorbed it and taken it with him, and I was rid of it forever” (203). Hence, Gene’s real battle is
never with Phineas, who he loves so deeply that he still feels connected to even after Phineas’ death,
but rather with the destructive feelings that led him to wound the one true friend he had. Gene’s battle
against the enemy of his own emotions, and the subsequent death of his friend, force him to mature, to
leave behind a childhood of games and face a starker reality. Thus, Gene’s war against himself functions
in the same way that World War II does for his childhood peers. Both battles force mere boys to face
dark truths about themselves, literally “fight” to preserve their own lives and identities, and ultimately,
to enter an adult world that is corrupted by the reality of death and violence. Consequently, both World
War II and Gene’s internal war end with a tragic loss of innocence and a pulling away from the real
world. Indeed, Gene’s loss of innocence is multifold as he loses not only his naïve beliefs about himself
and his world, but Phineas, who at his core seems innocence and nobility of spirit personified.
Furthermore, Gene seems to have become something of an isolationist. Like Leper, a former classmate
driven insane by his war experiences, Gene seems to have pulled away from the world and become
absorbed with his own philosophical musings. His actions beg the question: has Gene found “a separate
peace” at the end of the novel, or is he, like his former friends, so deeply wounded that he still fights a
battle, to confirm his own existence and identity, that he no longer even realizes he is waging?