Thursday, May 2, 2019
How does Gene feel about war and enlisting in this reading (look closely at pages 100-102)?(Ja'Niya)
Gene kind of wanted to enlist into the war but was waiting for somebody to do it before him. As Brinker, Leper, and Gene were talking Brinker decides to give up and tell them that he is going to enlist into the war. Gene then thinks to himself, “I felt the when he said it… I think i have been waiting for a long time for someone to say this so that I could entertain these decisive words myself”(Knowles 100). He thought it would be cool to just give up on everything he had been working for and joined the army even if he could die. He felt that it would be nice to go away from the stressful but amazing life that he was working for and just join the war and give up. Also how he expected things to have a bad side to it, and that he wouldn’t be wrong about it in the war like how he was with Finny. “...deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if it wasn’t there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself(Knowles 101). Overall, Gene has a positive feeling about enlisting into the war because he feels that he would like having deadly things lurking around him and being able to be relieved by just throwing away all the stress he has had from trying to get a perfect life.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
For Gene, Finny represents light, hope and this sense of carelessness--that anything is possible. Finny is barely affected by the grim blanket falling over the rest of the country during the war. Gene goes on a tangent about how deadly the war is, "But in the war, there was no question about it at all; it was there" (Knowles 101). The "it" that Gene refers to is the sense of death and darkness. Gene wants to enlist in the war so that he can escape all of the issues he's faced with at Devon. Most of those issues have to do with Finny because everything at Devon reminds him of his best friend. Gene doesn't love the actual idea of the war, but he feels somewhat attracted to it because he's seen the same destruction in himself that is present in the war. Gene finds the alternative to escape by volunteering for the draft comforting because it means he can stop worrying about what he's done wrong and completely shift his focus to something entirely unrelated. Finny's return is hugely significant because it forces Gene to sort out his problems then and there, stripping him of the option to run away.
ReplyDelete