Assignment #1: Gene is narrating his own story of what happened when he was in high school. How do a. his perspective (1st person narration) and b. the retrospective (looking back and telling a story as if it were the present) influence you as a reader and how does it impact the credibility or integrity of the story being told? (Madison)

John Knowles begins the novel with a retrospective point of view to enhance the reader’s understanding of his middle school world and how time can distort those memories from fifteen years ago. Gene revisits Devon School, which he attended as a teenager. He finds the old tree that he played on as a student and reflects on how much he has changed since those days at Devon, “This was that tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age” (Knowles 14). The retrospective angle given at the beginning of the novel influences the reader by providing them with Gene’s hindsight from fifteen years after the bulk of the story takes place. Gene mentions how people or things who made an enormous impact on someone's life a while ago can become less relevant or important to them with the passage of time. The two different perspectives of the same story told by the same person yet at different points in time increase the credibility of the story's narrator. When the reader obtains multiple accounts of the same information it is more likely that the story will be true, or at least sustain more integrity. The retrospective beginning to the novel adds a reflective piece from an older and more wisened Gene which the reader can refer back to throughout the remainder of A Separate Peace.