Changes in Gene and Leper
Leper is portrayed as the dreamer and eccentric loner at Devon, his idiosyncratic ways often being cause for ridicule. Unlike the other boys who accept, and sometimes even embrace the war, Leper grapples with it silently. Finally he shocks his classmates and becomes the first to enlist in the war, unable to stand the wait for what he views as the inevitable, stating "'. . . Everything has to evolve or else it perishes'" (117). Leper's absence makes the war even more surreal to the others; it had always seemed Leper was detached from the fighting of the real world. After all, it seemed unbelievable a war could "draw Leper voluntarily away from his snails and be
I was not of the same quality as he" (51). Leper's involvement in the military had forced him to emerge from his "cloud of vagueness", meeting the "horror, face to face, just as he had always feared" (196). After the accident, all bitterness towards Finny fades. Gene is so desperate in his envy that he shakes Finny off a limb in a high tree, causing Finny to be injured. The reader confirms this as Gene painfully admits, "He had never been jealous of me for a second. His quiet and quirky personality intensifies to the point of dementia. It is evident that Gene adores Finny, but in his smallness of self, he had mistaken this love for competition and resentment. Gene is an unpredictable character at this point, his narration tinged with insincerities and doubts. The reader watches as Gene becomes less and less dependent of Finny, and more like him, as he struggles to find an identity. Now I knew there never was and never could be any rivalry between us. By the end of the novel, Gene's mixed feelings of awe and contempt are changed into utter devotion, almost worship, as he begins to observe Finny as a branch of himself, finally saying, "I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case" (186). Gene asserts that Finny resents him for his scholastic achievements, but it is quickly realized that it is Gene who resents Finny, and even more so for Finny's lack of rival spirit. By crippling Finny, Gene brings his idol to his own level, telling the readers, "It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make" (52).
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Finny Gene,
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