John Knowles' a Separate Peace by Kirby Gann

Author:Kirby Gann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632460134
Publisher: IG Publishing

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Phineas accepts his athletic gifts as normal and natural, inseparable from who he is. Breaking a longstanding school record, excelling at most any sport despite not being of heroic size—Finny on the page can’t imagine his self separate from these characteristics, and the same holds as well to the boy reading him. He identifies so thoroughly with the boy who initiates the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session that it feels like he may as well be reading about himself; a slightly different, best self, transposed into a different time. Meaning: what he would have been like had he been born a few decades earlier. Rather than being astounded by Finny’s peculiar perfection, which some in class call unrealistic, he has a rapport with all that Finny does and says. Finny just makes sense in his conception of how things are, and it makes perfect sense that for such a natural human being, a shattered leg goes far beyond the mere pain of physical injury; it threatens a harrowing, unwanted change in personhood. For an athlete to lose the ability to play, to engage in any strenuous physical activity at all, goes beyond frustrated disappointment—he suffers a diminishment of his psyche; his own understanding of self, of purpose, perhaps even meaning is undone.

In this regard the novel presents more than an engaging story to him. Rather it becomes a terrifying tour of the possibilities—much like the journeys Scrooge takes on a single Christmas Eve in the company of the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future; a look at all that could go wrong in his own life, if he were to become unlucky. The possibility of a maiming injury that could keep him from the soccer fields, the trees to climb, the beloved Redline bike with its rad mag wheels, meant the loss of joys that anchor him, that give his own being its shape. It annoys him that after the fall from the tree the novel pulls away from Finny to focus almost exclusively on the narrator Gene. He wants to get back to Finny’s misfortune, not dwell on Gene’s guilty ramblings.

Through Finny he weighs the same fears that come in quiet nighttime moments when the world’s worries arrive and his thoughts turn morbid. He recognized early in the reading that the story was going to be a sad one, and he’s read enough to have formed the opinion that all the really good stories are, but still he holds hope that the sadness in A Separate Peace will be offset by Finny’s recovery.

Thoroughbreds are made for running and nothing else. If the horse suffers an injury that prevents its ability to run, the accepted wisdom is to save the animal from its misery and put it down. A human athlete can’t be put down like that, obviously, but he believes the horse’s fate makes a good analogy for what he might become if he were to suffer the same. In this light Phineas becomes a model to learn from if the unthinkable were to happen.

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