edits needed

if anyone you are willing could you read/edit my essay? the first page amd a half of so have been editited, so it's really the rest that needs to be edited. thanks


Villain v. Victim

Often society likes to view things as black and white, good and evil, but that is rarely true when human nature is involved. A saying exists which is something along the lines of “no one is pure evil.” This concept follows through in A Separate Peace. The only true victims or villains are concepts, abstract ideas, such as fate and innocence; the characters themselves are a combination of a victim and a villain. The villainous side of a character is not always a conscious side it can be an action with dark consequences. Furthermore, people may purposely stay in the role of a victim. The clear separation between being a villain and being a victim gets distorted because people can, and do, express both qualities through different areas of their lives. The distinctions between the qualities that make a villain or a victim become hazy in John Knowles’ novel, A Separate Peace.
Throughout the novel, fate is a villain; a looming force over the protagonists as it negatively affects their lives. War is the biggest predestined event in the lives of the boys at Devon. Before they actually can go to fight, they must prepare. The need to be prepared for combat drives Gene and Finny to climb up the tree; this tradition leads to Finny’s tragic fall. The need to succeed and “be somebody” in the army drives the majority of the boys, especially Brinker. He sacrifices much of the freedom and enjoyment of growing up to lead clubs, with the hope of this putting him on an accelerated path to success. Fate is shown in its most cruel and wicked persona when Finny dies. Finny was a generally healthy, vivacious, energetic, young man who could have gone far in the world; but fate intervened and ended his life early. Dr. Stanpole recounts to Gene, immediately following Finny’s death,
“’In the middle of it his heart simply stopped, without warning. I can’t explain it. Yes, I can. There is only one explanation. As I was moving the bone some of the marrow must have escaped into his blood stream and gone directly to his heart and stopped it. That’s the only possible explanation. The only one. There are risks, there are always risks. An operating table is a place where the risks are just more formal than other places. An operating room and a war” (185).

The surgery that Finny had had was a simple procedure; it should have been short and clean. However, by a brutal twist of fate, a tiny fragment of bone marrow stopped his heart. Finny’s death affected the lives of all who knew him, especially Gene. Fate often toyed cruelly with the boys at Devon, Finny himself was no exception.
During the course of the novel, Finny, a strong assertive character, became a victim. He was a victim of circumstance, which ended his life early. Before his life was over, his future had already ended. Finny broke his leg, twice. The first time he fell out of a tree; Gene describes it, “Finny, his balance gone…tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud…Eventually a fact emerged; it was one of his legs which had been “shattered”” (52-53). After that fall, Finny could hardly walk and all of his hopes of being on the Olympic Team in 1940 were gone, he would never again be an athlete. Fate is not the only one to blame for this fall; Gene jostled the branch Finny was standing on, which sent him crashing into the ground. Fate truly victimized Finny when he broke his legs for the second time. Finny storms out of a meeting, which was convening to find out what really happened in the tree, slips on the newly waxed floors and tumbles down a set of stairs. Finny was a victim of the circumstances that created the novel’s story line.
Finny was not a helpless victim; he was also a villain. Although his actions may not have been planned out with evil in mind, he is responsible for many of Gene’s academic failures. One day during the summer at Devon Finny asked Gene to bike to the beach with him. Gene details that, “The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden completely out of all bounds. Going there risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next morning…” (37). Finny knew full well that his friend had a test the next day and need to study, but he asked him anyway. One may argue that Gene had a choice of whether or not to go. However, Finny was exceptionally good at talking him into doing things he never would have done otherwise. Gene pondered early in the book, and the beginning of their friendship, “Why did I let him talk me into stupid things like this? Was he getting some kind of hold over me?” (9). As the novel progresses, Gene never disagrees with any of Finny’s plans. Relative to other actions happening in the world at that time Finny’s manipulation of Gene and the detriment of his grades are small. However, that does not stop his actions from being detrimental.
Along with being a main character in the novel, Gene is also a victim. Although a victim of Finny’s manipulations, he is mainly a victim of his own guilt. Throughout the novel, Gene continually struggles with whether or not he really pushed Finny out of the tree, and if he did was it intentional. Upon his visit to Finny’s Boston home, Gene tries to confront him about what happened on the tree. Gene says,
“It struck me that I was injuring him again. It occurred to me that this could be an even deeper injury than what I had done before. I would have backed out of it, I would have disowned it. Could it be that he might even be right? Had I really and definitely and knowingly done it to him after all? I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t think” (62).

Gene feels as though he must amend himself to Finny, in order to right the wrong he has done and find relief from his conscience. The weight of the blame and guilt Gene feels push him into emotional lows and cause a great deal of internal conflict and strife. Gene is a victim of the emotional stress that he placed upon himself.
Being human, Gene has another side to him, a villainous side. He is directly responsible for Finny falling out of the tree and breaking his leg, for the first time. The text states: “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb….with unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten” (52). The act happened with little thought and no regard for Finny’s safety. Gene spends the majority of the rest of the novel wondering whether his action was unintentional or done with cold precision; he never reaches a satisfying answer. The fact that all his fear was gone when Finny fell out of the tree gives the deed a malicious undertone. At the end of the novel Gene recalls, “…I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there” (196). The only person that Gene ever hated was Finny, because, “He minded, despised the possibility that I (Gene) might be the head of the school.” (44) In retaliation, as people often do, Gene despised Finny right back. By hating Finny and acting in a malicious manner towards him, Gene became a villain.
Leper was a victim of his innocence, reality, and also his friends. As the first boy at Devon to enlist in the military, Leper first experienced the realities of war and he was not prepared for them. Leper was rather naïve about what war really meant; he was living with the romantic idea of war, in which glory is found, the good guy always wins, and one comes home unchanged. His dream was shattered when the he faced the reality of war and training for it. As a result, Leper ran away from the army when it became too much for him to handle. When his schoolmates found out why he escaped from the army, they made jokes at his expense and discredited his service. Gene recalls,
“’He must be out of his mind,’ said Brinker energetically, ‘to do a thing like that. I’ll be he cracked up, didn’t he? That’s what happened. Leper found out that the army was just too much for him. I’ve heard about guys like that. Some morning they don’t get out of bed with everybody else. They just lie there crying. I’ll bet something like that happened to Leper.’ He looked at me. ‘Didn’t it?’
‘Yes. It did’” (149).

When Leper returned to school, his relationship with his friends was fractured and he stopped trusting them. When Gene goes to see him, Leper says to him:
“’Normal he repeated bitterly. ‘What a stupid-ass word that is. I suppose that’s what you’re thinking about, isn’t it? That’s what you would be thinking, somebody like you. You’re thinking I’m not normal, aren’t you? I can see what you’re thinking- I see a lot I never saw before’- his voice fell to a querulous whisper- ‘you’re thinking I’m psycho’” (135).

After that encounter, Leper treated his classmates with a sense of distrust whenever he interacted with them. He thought that they saw him as crazy and were using him to accomplish their own goals. The negative change caused his experience in the army and his subsequent interactions with his friends made Leper a victim.
The character’s innocence becomes sacrificed as they grow older and mature. The novel starts with Gene remembering a summer at Devon. During that time the boys are free to roam and do as they please and there is a sense that nothing bad could ever to them. This is the peak of their innocence and adolescents, where they don’t need to worry about what the future holds. As soon as the fall semester starts the boys are pressured to start preparing for the war and its effects become apparent. Gene says,
“I was ready for war, now that I no longer had any hatred to contribute to it. My fury was gone, I felt it gone, dried up at the source, withered and lifeless. Phineas had absorbed it and taken it with him, and I was rid of it forever” (195).

As people get older they learn to become numb to some of the realities of life, where as younger people are usually affected by them more; this happened to Gene. He went through emotional battles while still in high school and by the time he graduated he had become numb to those feelings. As time took its toll on Gene, the innocence of his childhood was lost. Innocence is a true victim because it can do nothing to alter its situation and the lives of the protagonists demonstrate this.
In A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the mixing of villains and victims is key to the plot. The novel focuses on the reason of the protagonists’ development and in doing this John Knowles shows how the villainous and victim sides of a person can coexist. He also depicts concepts, such as fate and innocence, as true villains and victims. The two main protagonists, Gene and Finny, mirror the combination and separation of the villains and victim that are found in all of humanity. The novel illustrates that what society wants to believe about good (victims) and evil (villains) is merely an illusion, created to make the world seem simple.