On page 52 of A Separate Peace, Gene asks Finny if he would mind if Gene became the head of class. Finny sarcastically says that he would kill himself out of envy, but Gene sees through his sarcasm and knows that Finny was not kidding at all. It takes Gene a minute, but he starts to see an elaborate plan that Finny created to make him better than Gene. Gene being better than Finny at academics, but still good at sports, in Finny’s mind, made Gene a better person than he is. So to stop Gene from becoming his full potential as head of class, and better than he is, Finny started dragging Gene into activities to prevent him from studying. One example of Finny preventing Gene from studying was convincing Gene to go to the beach with him. Had Gene not gone he would have been able to study for his test, but instead he went to the beach and as a result failed his test.
Gene feels tricked and let down by Finny. He believed that they were best friends and that the reason Finny would share everything with him was just out of kindness. You can tell that he feels this way because he starts to study harder and begins to compete with Chet Douglass for better grades, so there is no possible way of Finny catching up to him academically. Gene’s assumption is not accurate because later in the chapter Finny says that it is all right if he doesn’t want to come to the Super Summer Suicide Society meeting, which Gene thought was one of Finny’s ways of keeping him from studying. Do you think that Gene and Finny will grow further apart or remain friends? Is Gene imagining Finny’s plan or is it real? How will Gene’s assumption about Finny change their friendship?
