Friendship
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In life, as well in books there can be a lot of friendship going on; in some cases there can be bad friendships and there can be good friendships. In A Separate Peace Gene, in my opinion, Gene is not a good friend. In Catcher in the Rye Holden, in my opinion, is also not a good friend. I think that Holden and Gene are not good friends to other people and do not really know how to keep a friendship, because even though they both have friends, they both still discern their friends in bad ways or think bad things about them; because the person or friend has done something bad towards them or because they feel insecure towards the person or the situation that they are in.
In the book A Separate Peace Gene has some friends at Devon, but he has one best friend, Phineas (Finny), and Gene really gets a long with him; but Gene has a different point of view of Finny than everybody else at Devon. Gene and Finny are best friends but in their relationship Gene gets the wrong impression of Finny. “вЂ?Come on, lets go. We’ve got to be there. You never know, maybe he will do it this time.’ Oh for God sake.’ I slammed the French book. вЂ?What’s the matter?’ What a performance! His face was completely questioning and candid” (Knowles 57). In this quote Gene thinks that Finny is trying to take him away from his studies and is trying to get ahead of him. In my opinion If Gene was really a good friend he would have never had these thoughts about Finny or a least Gene would have known that’s how Finny acts. In the same sense Holden does the same thing to the people that care or like him as a friend.
Holden, the main character, in the book Catcher in the Rye has friends but really does not know how to understand how they act towards him. Holden judges a person before he really gets to know what they are trying to do; he calls the people that are not his close friends/ teachers, Phonies. “I didn’t feel like going into the whole thing with him. He wouldn’t have understood it anyway. It wasn’t up his alley at all. One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all For instance, they had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I environment in my life” (Salinger13-14). Holden really didn’t want to tell Mr. Spencer the reason he got kicked out of Elkton Hills and he decided to tell him that the school was full of phonies; and he really did not appreciate the people around him.
Gene as a friend has not yet come to understand how to appreciate what Finny does for him or how he acts towards him. Gene, for one, has a bad idea about the relationship that he has with Finny and does not communicate with him about his feelings. “I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth”(Knowles48). Gene wanted to tell Finny how he felt about both of them being friends but he felt like he could not tell him. In stead Gene kept it to himself and did not communicate with Finny. Gene really did not want to express the way he felt for Finny because he knew that he was going to end up hurting him some way and he also knew that he had a sort of jealousy towards Finny. In a way Holden also does not express his feelings, he keeps them for himself.
Holden in the same sense really does not care how he hurts other people and why he lies to them; and he keeps his feelings bottled up inside him and does not express them. ” I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (Salinger16). In this scene Holden has just finished visiting Mr. Spencer and Holden lied to him just so he can leave and not pay attention to what Mr. Spencer had to say. Holden also misinterprets what Mr. Spencer wanted to talk to him about. Holden thought that he was just going to give him a lecture, but Mr. Spencer really cared about him getting kicked out of school, and he was also worried about his future. Gene is the complete opposite when it comes to academics; in the way they are with their friends is sort of the same.
Gene wanted to have a good relationship with Phineas but Gene could not keep or work out the relationship that they had with each other. He knew that Phineas was a good friend and would never have had bad thoughts about him. Gene also knew that Phineas never actually hated anybody; Phineas was the only one that created a separate world for the boys at school, which Gene finally came to realize. “During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss. No one else I have ever met could do this… when they began to feel that there was this overwhelmingly hostile thing in the world with them, then the simplicity and unity of their characters broke and they were not the same again”(knowles202). Gene