How does the trees appearance surprise the narrator in “A Separate Peace”?
dymatsuoka eNotes Editor In the narrator’s mind, the tree is huge, “tremendous, an irate, steely black steeple beside the river”. When he returns to Devon many years later to look for it, he is shocked to find that there is a whole grove of trees standing on the river bank, and “any one of them might have been the one (he is) looking for…unbelievable that there were other trees which looked like it here”. When he finally does determine which is the particular tree he is looking for, he finds it “not merely smaller in relation to (his) growth, but…absolutely smaller, shrunken by age”. When the narrator had attended Devon as a youth, the tree had seemed a frightening thing, and the tragic events that took place in and around it were not something easily forgotten. When he sees the tree again as an adult, he is surprised by its unimposing appearance. The tree seems “weary from age, enfeebled, dry”, and makes the narrator realize that “nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a
