John Knowles A Separate Peace

In his novel A Separate Peace, John Knowles portrays the narrator’s solemn feelings about the Devon school. Gene revisits the Devon school and reminisces about his past there. He realizes a constant state of fear he had at Devon, he says “Unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence” (3). When he goes back to Devon there is still a fear he carries, that remerges as he comes back to the past he had “escaped”(4). Gene contrasts his fear in paragraph 5, he says “I felt fears echo, along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy” (5). This quote symbolizes or seems to hint that the fear spread out during those days and when a small amount of joy came to Gene he was overcome by