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Post by margaretpalko on Oct 27, 2015 22:06:57 GMT
The use of foreshadowing in the book "A Separate Peace" is incredibly important to the story. The first example of flashback begins when the book begins. The narrator, a young man named Gene, returns to his former private school named the Devon School Academy located in New Hampshire. The first thing Gene notices is that the school looks like a museum, so the reader instantly knows that Gene must be in the future due to the fact that he referencing the past. Gene states that he wants to visit a few "fearful" places one of which includes the tree. This famed tree starts the whole entire premise of the novel. The minute Gene sees the tree he is instantly brought back to the moment where he jounced the limb causing Phineas to fall and shatter his leg. Through flashback we understand that young Gene saw this tree as magnificent and wonderful, but his return as an adult proves to him that the tree is not anything special. Another important place Gene mentions is the marble staircase. The use of flashback in this story is not only to show change inside a person, but also this idea of perspective, and the fact that Knowles puts Gene in an adult perspective shows that adult Gene is able to comprehend and also maturely state the events that happened in the novel. Gene comes to the conclusion that "Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence" (Knowles 14). This quote represents that Gene finally changes and reaches some sort of acceptance within himself. He finds a release from something that has burdened him for many, many years.
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Post by tatummcp on Oct 29, 2015 0:22:31 GMT
I think the use of flashback is most important with regards to your last few sentences. Now that Gene is an adult he is able to better understand the events that happened to him as well as why these things happened. In class all last week and this week we have been talking about where certain events ended up in the stages of development (childhood, liminal state, and adulthood) and why they had to take place in those stages. For example, we as the reader see that Phineas continuously pulls Gene back into the childhood state (Blitzball, stopping him from enlisting in the war, and not letting Gene apologize for pushing him out of the tree) no matter how close to being an adult he is, but Gene did not see that until he took the time to look back on his life (the flashback). At the point when Gene wants to go enlist in the war (a very adult-like thing to do) Phineas is the one who stops him from doing so because he is back in their room and quickly comes up with childish things to do with Gene. Until Finny accepted the truth (started on his way to become an adult) and passed away, Gene was being held from becoming an adult. At the time Gene did not realize that Phineas was the one that stopped him from growing up, but in this flashback where Gene has already experienced these things and learned from all the events he understands that it was not until Phineas passed away that Gene even had the ability to mature and become an adult. If Gene were still young and not looking back on the events that shaped him into the person he is today he would not be able to see the effect that Phineas had on his character because he would not have the mature understanding of events from his time in the liminal state (where he is still learning from mistakes).
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Post by Ms. McGettigan on Oct 30, 2015 0:32:03 GMT
Great ideas here, ladies. It's interesting to think how using flashback so heavily (basically, it's our whole story) affects the meaning. Do you think it affects Gene's reliability? How has the fifteen years changed his feelings and perceptions of what happened at Devon? Just some things to think about...
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