Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. Brinker Hadley comes from a wealthy family and is obsessed with truth, order, and justice. Like Finny , Brinker is well-known on campus and widely considered a leader.
But while Finny stands for the freewheeling innocence of youth, Brinker represents the reserved discipline of adulthood. However, Finny returns that very day, and Gene decides to stay at Devon instead of joining the military. Losing steam, Brinker also decides to delay his enlistment, and this decision leads to a sense of disillusionment with the ordered, respectable life he has built. In turn, Brinker quits the many clubs and committees to which he belongs and adopts a cynical attitude about the war, reveling in the idea of breaking rules in his final year at Devon.
At the same time, though, he never loses his passion for justice and discovering the truth, a fixation that leads him to suspect Gene of intentionally harming Finny. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:.
Chapter 6 Quotes. Related Themes: War and Rivalry. Page Number and Citation : 74 Cite this Quote. Explanation and Analysis:. Chapter 7 Quotes. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. Chapter 8 Quotes. Chapter 12 Quotes. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. Brinker senses Gene's dark secret — that he envies and resents Finny — and tries to exploit it by needling him about his friend.
Brinker's manipulation takes an especially cruel turn as he escalates his needling into the trial in the Assembly Room. Here his motivation seems strangely similar to Gene's own in causing Finny to fall.
Indeed, as the story dramatizes, affection — and even love — can become harmful and finally destructive in the emotionally charged atmosphere of a boys' prep school. By the last chapter, Brinker seems less aggressively competitive — but, of course, Finny is dead now, and the competition is over. Brinker actually comes around to profess a version of Finny's conspiracy theory about the war and even produces a chief example in the person of his own father, who seems to be one of those fat and foolish old men behind the war.
Yet Brinker seems less mature in the last chapter than Gene, who can now view Mr. Hadley with tolerance and even pity. The transition from the Summer to Winter session means Finny leaves the seat of power and Brinker enters it — but only temporarily.
When Finny comes back to Devon, we expect a showdown of sorts, and Knowles delivers, via the Winter Carnival. The battle is brief, and Phineas wins out. Or, as Gene says, "Brinker the Lawgiver had turned rebel for the Duration" 9. But it's not until the end of the novel that Finny realizes what initiated Brinker's transformation in the first place. Like much else in A Separate Peace , this has everything to do with the war.
Brinker, who everyone thought would be the first to enlist, quickly becomes disillusioned with the idea of fighting. Gene identifies his feelings as "a faintly self-pitying resentment against millions of people he did not know" Brinker doesn't want to fight in the war his father started.
This is interesting.
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