Question

A Separate Peace, Ch. 1

Answer 1

After fifteen years have passed since he attended, the narrator of the story, Gene Forrester, returns to the Devon School in New Hampshire. As he strolls over the campus, he observes that everything appears to have been perfectly preserved, as if the structures had been given a coat of varnish to preserve them exactly as they were when he was a student there. He considers how anxious he was back then—in the early 1940s, as World War II raged in Europe—and makes the decision to travel to the two locations he most vividly associates with that anxiety. One of the academic buildings has a marble staircase, and Gene determines that it must be constructed of an extraordinarily strong stone because the foot impressions left over the years are still only shallow.

• He spends some time gazing at these stairs before leaving, walking through the dorms and the gym while damaging his shoes on the muddy playing fields. Once there, he searches the river's banks for a certain tree, which he eventually finds amid a grove of trees that are rather similar to one another. A number of wounds on the tree's trunk and the manner that one of its branches protrudes over the river help him identify it.
• The French phrase plus chose, plus change, which means "the more things remain the same, the more they change," comes to mind as he considers how much smaller this tree seems now than it did when he was younger. In order to escape the rain, he turns and enters.
• When Gene is sixteen and standing at the base of the same tree, which towers over him like a "steely black steeple," the story cuts to the summer of 1942. Elwin "Leper" Lepellier, Chet Douglass, and Bobby Zane are also present, along with Gene's roommate Phineas, or Finny, and four other lads. No student their age has ever attempted the accomplishment that Finny is trying to get them to perform—jumping off a branch of the tree into the river. The older boys at the school perform the jump as part of their physical preparation before they graduate and leave for the war.

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