Rhetorical Strategies

• Imagery: “His skin radiated a reddish copper glow of tan, his brown hair had been a little bleached by the sun, and I noticed that the tan made his eyes shine with a cool blue-green fire” (47).
• Oxymoron: “I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise” (55).
• Simile: “I felt like a wild man who had stumbled in from the jungle to tear the place apart” (69).
• Extended Metaphor: “So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us… seeming inescapable…I had simply ducked… the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead… I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in” (110).
• Anaphora: “Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had” (203).

In John Knowles’s novel, A Separate Peace, are applied to add style to Knowles’s work. Narrated through the eyes of Gene, a student at a New England boarding school, the novel tells the tale of the turmoil of friendship during World War II. While describing his best friend, Finny, Gene states that Finny’s “skin radiated a reddish copper glow of tan… and [Gene notices] that the tan made [Finny’s] eyes shine with a cool blue-green fire” (47). This imagery shows that Gene highly favors Finny for Finny seems to be a god-like figure in Gene’s mind. However, Gene begins to doubt Finny’s true appearance and begins to form a slight hatred for his best friend. This hatred or jealousy has left Gene wishing “to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise” (55). The usage of an oxymoron here, allows Knowles to convey Gene’s conflicting opinions that are creating the mayhem in his mind. The feeling of hate overpowers Gene’s judgment and he ends up knocking Finny from a tree. When Gene attempts to tell Finny that his fall was not accidental, Gene feels “like a wild man who had stumbled in from the jungle to tear the place apart” (69). By utilizing a simile to describe Gene’s emotions, the author conveys that Gene’s actions were not stemmed from pure hatred, but from the confusion of adolescence. Once Finny returns to Devon, Gene uses Finny as an excuse to avoid the war for “the war [had] swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on [them]… seeming inescapable…[Gene] had simply ducked… the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead… [he] did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in” (110). Knowles’s usage of this extended metaphor shows the reader that war frightens Gene and he will use any excuse to avoid it. The extended metaphor also shows that while either avoiding the war or Finny’s accident, one was inexorably going to become reality for Gene. Finny’s life is ultimately ended by marrow from his bones entering his blood stream and seizing his heart. After Finny’s death, Gene realizes that Finny had a spirit that nothing could demolish, “nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last [Gene] had” (203). The anaphora illustrates that not even the tribulations of war could impair Finny’s vitality, but that the one who he believed that he was closest to could.