Compare And Contrast: A Turn With The Sun And A Separate Peace Essay, Research Paper

Although many similarities exist between A Turn with the Sun and A Separate Peace, both written by John Knowles, the works are more dissimilar than alike. A Separate Peace is a novel about the struggle of a senior class in the face of World War II, and it focuses on two best friends, Gene Forrester and Phineas. A Turn with the Sun is about a young man who struggles to fit in as a freshman in the closed microcosm of a senior dominated school who struggles, vainly, to make a name for himself.

Knowles wrote A Turn with the Sun in the third person. His character, Lawrence is trying to make a name for himself as an underclassman. He suffers from a poor self image, as “Lawrence sensed once again that he was helplessly sliding back, into the foggy social bottom-land where unacceptable first-year boys dwell.” (A Turn with the Sun:12) He sees his achievements and failures as analogous to his worth as a person. He feels that he is a failure, yet is thankful that, “…the hockey captain had never invaded his room, as he had Fruitcake Putsby’s next door, and festooned his clothes through the hall; he had never found a mixture of sour cream and cereal in his bed at night, no one had ever poured ink into the tub while he was bathing. The victims of such violations were genuine outcasts.” (A Turn with the Sun: 12) The other boys see Lawrence as an annoyance rather than an exile, while he feels that he is better than the other boys at Devon. This is reinforced when he thinks, “When he plunged from the railing he had been just another of the unknown new boys, but when he broke the surface of the water in that remarkable dive, one that he had never attempted before and was never to repeat, he became for his schoolmates a boy to be considered.” (ATurn with the Sun:13) The dive serves as an inauguration into the school’s social system. It is symbolic of risk, achievement and imperfection; it brings together the gap between the river, which represents the unknown, and the bridge one stands on, the tangible world where the boys feel secure. Lawrence, like Leper who will be discussed later, “…merely inhabited the nether world of the unregarded, where no one bothered him or bothered about him.” (A Turn with the Sun:13). Lawrence is not in fact so much despised as viewed with disdain.

Lawrence wishes both to fit in and have his schoolmates admire him as an individual. This desire leads to his death, “…in the river which winds between the playing fields.” (A Turn with the Sun:28) Knowles foreshadows Lawrence’s demise when, “He had felt he was still in the air as he walked from the gym back to his room that afternoon, still spinning down upon his own bright image in the murky water.”(A Turn with the Sun) Knowles uses the word “bright” to convey the sense of hope Lawrence has for the future, and represent his potential for a bright future. Unfortunately, the water is “murky” which points out that the future Lawrence is jumping into is an ambiguous one. Inadequacy, failure, and death, are all possibilities in the murky waters of his future, hidden by his bright image and ambitions.

They play down Lawrence’s death at the end, “I don’t think he cared,” Bruce remarked suddenly. The headmaster straightened sharply. “What do you mean?” Bruce’s thoughts doubled over this instinctive statement, to censor it or deny it…” (A Turn with the Sun:30) Not well liked, “…he marveled again at his own failure, after seven months, to win a single close friend.” (A Turn with the Sun:12), Lawrence is quickly transformed from someone they reproach, “…he threw his small steamer trunk, filled with shoes and books, down the long flight of stairs under which the housemaster lived…they concluded that he was strange.” (A Turn with the Sun:20) to someone they have forgotten.

A Separate Peace is a confession in retrospective from the first person point of view of Gene, one of the two main characters. (Barron) It is the story of Gene and Finny, two opposite friends who are approaching graduation and the high probability that they will be sent to war. Phineas is a risk taker who shrugs off the rules at the first opportunity, “Phineas didn’t really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it.” (A Separate Peace: 11) Because of his manipulative personality, Phineas is able to get away with many things others at the Devon school cannot. “The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant’s corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.” (A Separate Peace:16) The breaking of Phineas’ leg may have been partially due to the permissive attitudes of their administrators. Phineas refuses to believe in the war; hence he has a distorted world image. Lawrence sees himself as a great athlete; hence he, too, has a distorted self-image. This is evidenced by the fact that A Separate Peace deals with the larger subject matter of the second World War and its effects upon a group of students who expect to be drafted into it. In contrast, A Turn with the Sun is the story of a first year student at a new school.

Further, Phineas’ injury is due to Gene’s belief that Phineas is taking him to the river to distract him from his studies. Gene in his guilt rationalizes, “It was just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that’s all it was.” (A Separate Peace:183) Gene has the sense to question his motivations, which allows him to better himself, or at least recognize his mistakes and attempt to make an amends. The truth is simpler in A Turn with the Sun as, “Lawrence felt dizzy at the barefaceness of this lie.” (A Turn with the Sun:16) Gene continues to question his motivation for moving the branch while Lawrence, “…felt himself more thoroughly aware than he had ever been of how the world went, of who fitted where, of what was grand and genuine and what was shoddy and fake.” (A Turn with the Sun:16) Lawrence sees what he believes to be the truth because, like many freshmen, he is too na?ve to perceive how childish he is. His gullibility is especially evident in his plans to become the “proteg?” of Captain Marvel, a senior. “He rushed ahead now, eager to impress him even more; no, by golly, he was through impressing people. Now he was ready to leap, in one magnificent bound, to the very peak of his ambitions…” This leap is too far; Lawrence attempts to do too much at once, bouncing from one extreme to another.

Although one could compare Lawrence with Gene, Brinker, and Leper, they contrast enough to where they cannot be said to represent the same ideas. Just as Brinker is left out of Gene and Finny’s relationship (Barron), so is Lawrence excluded from the society of the upperclassmen; they are both odd-man-out. They are self-righteous characters, who act childishly when they do not get their way. Lawrence possesses Gene’s quietude, without his detached perspective; he has Leper’s rejection, but without Leper’s thoughtfulness. Gene acts as a symbol of questionable motivations. This extends into questioning not only why he “jounced” the limb, but the cause of the war. Leper is the innocent going to war, trusting of the propaganda video which betrays him. Lawrence does not seem to possess any redeeming qualities, except his determination. He is an empty character who Knowles uses to portray a typical first-year experience. He is more child than adult, a true adolescent. Perhaps he represents a young child, his death is that of the credulity and ambitions that die as one becomes an adult.

Elwin Lepellier, called Leper, may be a symbolic figure characterized by his homonym. A leper is both “…a person having leprosy…” and “…a person to be shunned or ostracized, as because of the danger of moral contamination.” (Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia) His simplicity na?vely leads him to be a part of the war as he is convinced that all he will have to do as a soldier is ski. While sometimes frowned upon by his classmates, Leper is still a part of the senior class, unlike A Turn with the Sun which mentions “genuine outcasts” (A Turn with the Sun:12) Leper experiences some sort of trauma upon entering the military and returns early due to psychological difficulties. Knowles reflects his quandary in the weather, “…I could never see a totally extinguished winter field without thinking it unnatural. I would tramp along trying to decide whether corn had grown there in the summer, or whether it had been a pasture, or what it could ever have been, and in that deep layer of the mind where all is judged by the five senses and primitive expectation, I knew that nothing would ever grow there again.” (A Separate Peace:139) Here the field symbolizes Leper; the weather is the war. This enhances the others’ fear of going to war, “We members of the Class of 1943 were moving very fast toward the war now, so fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, a mind was clouded and a leg was broken – maybe these should be thought of as minor and inevitable mishaps in the accelerating rush. The air around us was filled with much worse things.” (A Separate Peace:179) Gene sees the war as a destructive reality and feels the pain of losing a friend. He fears for himself and his classmates as he sees the inevitable war rushing toward him.

The two works vary greatly, A Turn with the Sun is the author’s passive third person expression of first year student anxieties, and A Separate Peace tells the first person story of a group of friends facing a personal war. These two stories, while deceptively similar, are substantially more different than they are alike.

Morgan Glines

Cult and Religion in Relation to the Glass

September 10, 1996

English AP