Julia Schwartz
English I H (A)
A Separate Peace Journal Entry (1)
“The war was and is reality for me. I still instinctively live and think in its atmosphere… America is not, never has been, and never will be what the songs and poems call it, a land of plenty… The war will always be fought very far from America and it will never end. Nothing in America stands still for very long…” (32)
Gene Forrester, usually a positive-minded teenager with a fairly cheerful- or at the very least content- outlook, is affected by World War II, perhaps so much that this positive outlook turns around to slap him in the face and he becomes cynical in an almost surreal way.
Looking back on the war’s effect on him as a teenager in boarding school, Gene begins to talk about America as a fantasy, a dream, a hope, and a desire for something that isn’t. He begins his reflection by telling how his life revolved around the war, how the war affected everything that he and everybody that he knew did, recognizing the war as having almost total control over everyone, no matter how hard they tried to ignore it and get away from it. Gene is a step above some by realizing that the war is real, but is a step or two below many others, as he doesn’t realize the inevitable: the war does affect him. By ignoring it, he seems almost naïve, as if he really doesn’t realize that the war is happening… He knows the war is happening, but does not really feel its effects in a way that he can recognize. And if he does realize it, he could be trying desperately to get away from it, thinking that if he ignores it enough, it really will go away, as a child wishes unpleasant things in their lives away.
After acknowledging the hold WWII held over him, Gene moves on to America itself, commenting on the unrealistic views of America as a wonderful place, referring to songs which call it “the land of plenty” (32) He comments about how America is so imperfect, how “nylon, meat, gasoline, and steel are rare; [t]here are too many jobs and not enough workers… there isn’t much to buy” (32) and how the “trains are always late and always crowded” (32). He comments about the dissatisfaction of Americans, talking about how the “people in America cry often,” and how they are attached to the news, reading newspapers plastered with names and places and pictures, such as a brutally dead Mussolini “hanging on a meat hook” (33). He then almost becomes pompous, commenting on how “all pleasurable things… are in the very shortest supply” (33), and that “all foreign lands are inaccessible.” He then names the ‘color of life in America’ as drab olive green, saying “most other colors risk being unpatriotic.” Perhaps by the mention of the color, Gene feels as though the colors pertain to actions- and the only acceptable action for a 16-year-old teenage boy is to enlist in the Army, and he feels as though anything else a boy of that age would do is socially unacceptable, or, in his words, “unpatriotic.” It seems as though even though the war has such a strong hold over Gene, he feels distant and set apart from it in ways that even he doesn’t understand.
Building promptly off of this, Gene then says, “the war will always be fought very far from America” (32). This statement confirms his lack of understanding the war, as he says directly between the lines that it always will be something that Americans are a part of, but none of them understand and few realize their role in.
In conclusion, it can be said that Gene doesn’t entirely understand the war, and, like many other Americans, feels discomforted by it, and feels only the social pressure placed upon teenage boys. He also discusses the war- and America- as something built up only as a disappointment to those who find it- perhaps like finding the end of a rainbow…