How to teach "A Seperate Peace"
...er cannot help but fall in love with Finny. And yet, there was a strangeness to this book—a quality which I can’t quite identify—which puts me at a loss for how to teach it. It is not a typical sort of linear story. The best of times, the best of friends, but with an undercurrent of betrayal never quite dealt with. Plus, it involves complicated and mixed feelings toward wartime which are not entirely within my own grasp. Am I too young too teach this book? Although, there is a corresponding ache in all troubled adolescence, I’m sure. A child’s need to pretend that his own war is not really raging. That his parents aren’t divorcing, or that he hasn’t experienced some tragic hurt or loss. And that an explosion of life should, of course, take its place. I don’t know. To be honest, the end still eludes me. ...