As with most novels, it is best to begin a discussion of thematic by examining the
            
             title. The phrase, "a separate peace," is mentioned once in the novel when, speaking of the
            
             Winter Carnival, Gene writes: "it was this liberation we had torn from the grey
            
             encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary,
            
             illusory, special and separate peace" (118). The Devon of 1942 and 1943 is, at times, a
            
             haven of peace and forgetfulness for Gene and his classmates. And it is significant that it is
            
             termed a "separate peace" because it indicates that the peace achieved is not part of the
            
             surrounding reality, which, for Gene, is a world of conflict, a world at war. The joy that
            
             the older Gene remembers upon re-visiting Devon is due to such momentary periods of
            
             complete freedom achieved during the summer of 1942 and the following school year,
            
             moments when a sixteen year-old could live without conflict or rules, and forget about the
            
             controled reality of a world war.
            
            
             The novel is about a young man's struggle to achieve and maintain such a separate
            
             peace. And although the setting is in an America in the midst of war, the focus of the
            
             novel is internal. For the majority of the plot, the distant war is an illusion for the students
            
             in Gene's class, and for the reader, the war becomes the biggest metaphor of the novel: a
            
             metaphor for the internal conflict of a sixteen-year old boy. Gene's soul becomes a
            
             battleground where jealousy, fear, love, and hatred combat for control of his actions. And
            
             amidst the turmoil of adolescence, it is the victory of the dark forces of human nature that
            
             make Gene realize that each person is alone with his enemy, that the only significant wars
            
             are not made by external causes, but "by something ignorant in the human heart" (173).
            
             Thus, Finny's fantastic assertion that World War II is an illusion maintains a certain tr...