A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is John Knowles’s crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. I thought that the drawback of the movie was that it was less personal than the novel.Summary An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to the second world war.

In general, I think that reading the book is always better than watching the movie and A Separate Peace definitely proved that. The movie, I feel, was unable to capture his essence. His fragile state after his experience in the army, was a huge point of interest for me in the book. In the movie version however, Leper flees to the woods outside Devon after he is discharged but is eventually spotted by Gene who follows him into the woods where the confrontation occurs. A Separate Peace Movie and NovelĪlso, many of the confrontations and dialogs in novel were downplayed in the film Another difference between the book and the novel is Gene’s confrontation with Leper, in the novel Leper goes home after he is discharged from the army and confronts Gene there. For example, Gene’s intense emotional battle before pushing Finny off the tree had to be left out of the film, making him seem more simple-minded than he came off in the book. Having Gene tell his own story added a lot more to the story in my opinion, because you were able to see for yourself what made him tick, what went on in his head, and what drove him to do the things that he did. I thought that the book’s first-person approach was a better idea and made the story more personal whereas the third-person narration didn’t bring you as far into Gene’s head as the book.

The book was told in first-person from Gene’s point of view in the novel while the movie was told by a third-person narrator.

This is a fairly important scene and gets the reader interested through foreshadowing early on in the story but was left out of the film. A Separate Peace Movie and Novel Comparison The first noted difference between the movie and book is that and the novel, before the flashback while Gene is revisiting Devon he remarks that he wants to visit two places, the tree and the marble stairs.

A separate peace online book