Electronic Journal #1

In A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the characters explore their innermost desires and ambitious adventures at The Devon School in New Hampshire. Phineas, the charismatic super-athlete leads the narrator onto many journeys to diverge himself away from his studies. This ongoing competition between the two best friends leads to bitter rivalries between them. In one scene, Phineas breaks the school’s swimming record in secret and the narrator starts to question whether the two of them are “even” in nature. The narrator figures out the question to this existentialist question by saying, “You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone.” Each of these characters is trying to find their “separate peace” among confinements of the school. With WWII in the background, it sets up the path to which the 16 and 17 year olds at the school find a way to engage in some fun before their hardships and real life presses forward.
Compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse – Five, there are some similarities between the setting, mindset of characters, and the dispositions of the characters. For one, both novels have a backdrop of WWII. Neither of them is necessarily engaged in the war throughout the entire novel, but references and experiences protrude. Secondly, Billy and the narrator of A Separate Peace have similar mindsets in which they question the true nature of what’s happening to them. Billy is always intertwined with time and the narrator is caught up being a teenager for one more time before he could possibly be drafted into the war. Lastly, their dispositions are quite similar. Both characters are considered “followers” in which they never lead a pack or person. Billy follows and tags along with other soldiers and the narrator in A Separate Peace tags along with his best friend, Phineas. In these ways in the first part of A Separate Peace, my first two novels have similarities between them.