Comparing A Turn with the Sun and A Separate Peace :: comparison compare contrast essays

try Comparing A Turn with the Sun and A Separate calmness Although many similarities exist between A Turn with the Sun and A Separate Peace, both written by John Knowles, the works ar more dissimilar than alike. A Separate Peace is a refreshful about the struggle of a senior class in the appear of World War II, and it focuses on two best friends, Gene Forrester and Phineas. A Turn with the Sun is about a young man who struggles to scoff in as a freshman in the closed microcosm of a senior dominated school who struggles, vainly, to make a name for himself. Knowles wrote A Turn with the Sun in the third person. His character, Lawrence is trying to make a name for himself as an underclassman. He suffers from a poor self image, as Lawrence sensed once again that he was helplessly sliding back, into the stuporous social bottom-land where unacceptable first-year boys dwell. (A Turn with the Sun12) He sees his achievements and failures as analogous to his worth as a person. He fee ls that he is a failure, yet is thankful that, ...the hockey captain had never invaded his room, as he had Fruitcake Putsbys next door, and festo nonpareild his clothes through the hall he had never found a mixture of sour cream and cereal in his bed at night, no one had ever poured ink into the bathroom while he was bathing. The victims of such violations were genuine outcasts. (A Turn with the Sun 12) The former(a) boys see Lawrence as an annoyance rather than an exile, while he feels that he is better than the other boys at Devon. This is reinforced when he thinks, When he plunged from the kick he had been just another of the unknown new boys, but when he broke the surface of the water in that remarkable dive, one that he had never attempted before and was never to repeat, he became for his schoolmates a boy to be considered. (ATurn with the Sun13) The dive serves as an inauguration into the schools social system. It is emblematical of risk, achievement and imperfection it bri ngs together the gap between the river, which represents the unknown, and the bridge one stands on, the tangible world where the boys feel secure. Lawrence, like Leper who will be discussed later, ...merely be the nether world of the unregarded, where no one fazed him or bothered about him.