What are the symbols in “A Separate Peace”?
In John Knowle’s ‘A Separate Peace’, symbols are used to develop and advance the themes of the novel. One theme is the lack of an awareness of the real world among the students who attend the ‘Devon Academy’. The war is a symbol of the ‘real world’, from which the boys exclude themselves. It is as if the boys are in their own little world or bubble secluded from the outside world and everyone else — Along with their friends, Gene and Finny play games and joke about the war instead of taking it seriously and preparing for it. Finny organizes the Winter Carnival, invents the game of Blitz Ball, and encourages his friends to have a snowball fight. The war is a symbol of how things aren’t always what they seem — The war affects the students and faculty at Devon because bit by bit it begins to intrude on their lives. ‘The war is presented first as a distant source of uneasiness, but its presence gradually grows into an emblem of the encroachment of the adult world’s most mundane elements
