1. Of mice and men
Through the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles, one of the main characters named Gene Forester is seemingly always in a conflict. These conflicts both internal and external plague Gene until the very end. It is these conflicts that lead to the creation of an enemy that Gene is at war with throughout A Separate Peace. This enemy is Gene himself.
The first time the enemy within Gene gets the best of him, it causes him to hurt his best friend. When Gene and Finny create the "Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session" they decide to make the initiation jumping out of a tree by the Devon River. It is this event that sparks the outrageous suspicion that maybe Finny is trying to ruin Gene's academics by keeping him busy with the club. This envy of Finny builds in Gene over time and at each meeting they start by both of them jumping from the tree. Finally at one meeting when they were both on the limb, Gene's feelings caused him to jounce the limb in a blind impulse resulting in Finny falling and breaking his leg. Although Gene did not think anyone saw what happened, one person did. Leper Lepellier witnessed Gene's blind rage from the ground and ironically would see it again.
Leper was the first of Gene and Finny's class to enlist. He enlisted in the ski troops after seeing a recruiting video. No one expected to hear from Leper until during the Winter Carnival, Gene received a letter telling him that Leper had escaped and wanted Gene to meet him. Gene, being intrigued by the letter, left to meet Leper at his home in Vermont. When Leper starts describing his hallucinations of the war to Gene, it causes him to respond in anger. Gene reacts by yelling and at one point even kicks the chair out from under Leper. His problem is not as much with Leper as it is a conflict with himself over the war. In anger he leaves Leper and returns back to Devon.
The last stand of the enemy within Gene is held when he, Finny, Brinker, and a few others are in an assembly room at Devon.
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