Assignment 12, Question 4: Gene reflects on Phineas’ impact on his life at the bottom of page 202 and top of page 203. In this passage, what do you think Gene means when he says “Phineas alone had escaped this” (202)? What did he escape? And did he do so by dying or by the way he lived his life? (see also page 204)

Because of the war, all of the boys at Devon, and indeed all over the world have developed a sad and dismal view of life which has been propagated by anything bad in their lives; Phineas, however, was able to “escape” this and maintain a positive outlook on life. In the beginning of the book, the war seems to be a distant and oppressive fog that has set over the rest of the world, but later, especially in the last chapter when the troops start to move into Devon, Gene realizes how connected to the war everyone really is, and how especially, how he is surrounded by it. It is a terrible thought to be connected to such violence and sadness, and would change anyone’s disposition to life.

            Phineas has gone through life with what seems to be constant happiness and ease. This is mainly what attracted the other boys at Devon to him. His confidence in himself and his talents are a testament to this ability of his to glide through life. As a result this, it is very difficult for Phineas to deal with hardship or tragedy. Both of which came crashing down upon him when his leg was broken after falling off of the tree, and then when Leper returned and made the war feel so unjustly real to him, and finally the last straw was when the idea that Gene, his best friend, a person whom he would think of as “part of him”, broke his leg purposefully. Gene realizes this when he reminisces, “Phineas alone had escaped this…. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had,” (Knowles 203). Since Phineas lacks the life experience to deal with all of these unforeseen happenstances, he started to deny them. First it was Gene’s involvement in the accident, and then it was the war. After being his friend for so long, Gene knows about Phineas’ tendency to block things out; “… 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,” (Knowles 202). Phineas’ inability to see anything but the good in people is what endeared him to Gene, and eventually, what led Phineas to forgive him despite everything.