Assignment #4: What is guilt? Do we all have it? Is it part of being human? Can someone live guilt free?(Mike)

Guilt is this feeling that you know you did something wrong and you’re hiding it. Everybody will experience guilt at some point in time because its part of life and holds things together. In Chapter 5 of A Separate Peace, Gene is faced with guilt because he forced Finny to fall off of the tree that the two were going to jump off of together. This resulted in Finny never being able to play sports again, which was his favorite thing to do. At first, Gene doesn’t really feel guilt, but when he is sitting around doing nothing, it comes to him, “That night I slept easily, and it was only on waking up that this illusion was gone, and I was confronted with myself, and what I had done to Finny.”(Knowles 62). Even outside the book, guilt is something everybody encounters and it is extremely hard when facing it. Gene knows that he pushed off Finny, and after Gene tells Finny, he feels terrible because Finny is heartbroken, even though it was the right thing to do. That is the way guilt works because it gives you the feeling of being sick, which lets you know when you have done something wrong. This is why guilt is good, because without it, people could be doing bad things and not feel the urge to fix it.