Ari Benkler- Does Finny's death surprise you? Chapters 12-13 Assignment #11

A Separate Peace is about coming of age and boys growing into men through the trial of the war and their own schooling and the challenges it offers them. Finny's injury means that he has no future in the war, which is the defining moment of the time, and so the only reasonable way for him to be in the story is dead, so that he cannot continue as a sad shadow of his former self, but merely as a memory, like in the poem about the young dead athlete. The story focuses on the futures of the boys and where they will go. The voice of maturity, the establishment, and responsibility in the last chapter, Brinker's father, asks Gene about his future, because he thinks that is the most important thing. "What are you enlisting in, son?" (Knowles 198). Brinker's father continues to give a lecture to Brinker and Gene about how important it will be to other people and to themselves what they did during the war, and how their futures will depend on their acts in the war. He says, "You have to do what you think is the right thing... people will get their respect for you from that... " (Knowles 199). By this Brinker's father means to say that they will regret it if they fail to participate actively in the war, and people would hold it against them and look on them as odd and somehow less worthy for it. Finny was not able to participate in the war, and so if he continued to live it would be only as a pale shadow of his former self, which would be depressing for him and for all those around him. He would be the poor young cripple with nowhere to go in life and nothing to do. That he died saved him from a terrible existence, and it was hardly surprising that John Knowles did not want the readers to see Finny as a useless man, broken and bitter at the destruction of his future. The best way from the story's point of view was for him to die.