Comparing Maturity in Separate Peace and All Quiet on the Western Front :: comparison compare contrast essays

due date in A Separate recreation and All Quiet on the westward apparent movement The evolution of a child to adult is a long and complex process. There is another transitional step that goes in the middle of these two periods. In warlike terms, such as those utilize in the settings of Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front and John Knowless A Separate Peace, that step could be classified as being a soldier. W.N. Hodgson acknowledges this progression as well, in the poem in the lead Action. The speaker begs first for God to overhear him a soldier (line 8) and indeed once he is a soldier he asks God to actualise him a man (16). Soldiers arent quite children anymore theyve seen too much pain, death, and hatred to maintain their innocence as children do. However, they arent really men yet either. In A Separate Peace and All Quiet on the Western Front, the characters all go through this process of growing up, where they begin as children and proceed on to being soldiers, finally emerging as strong, perceptive men by the end of the book. The characters in A Separate Peace are first seen as children. Gene and Phineas (or Finny), the main characters in A Separate Peace, are first portrayed as regular teen boys, full of life, energy, and humor. Ready to find fun in e very(prenominal)thing, the boys unconstipated up make games out of the war, including the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session (Knowles 24) and blitzball (Knowles 29). They take up out of trees as a substitute for jumping out of a plane and throw a round ball around, pretending that its a bomb. People perceive them as careless and wild and perhaps even a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve (Knowles 17). They go through things that everyone experiences as a teen jealousy, peer pressure, and competition. They dont know very much about the war or about life itself. Finny even blatantly denies the existence of the war, saying that the fat old men who do nt requisite them crowding up their jobs have cooked up this war fake (Knowles 107). nonpareil of the boys in their class, Leper, dreams of enlisting in the ski troops, seeing it as a safe, clean way to get involved in the war quite a than having to kill and destroy.