Against his better judgment, Gene climbs the tree and also jumps, but the three others refuse. The shared danger of jumping brings Finny and Gene closer. While the rest of the boys hurry ahead at the sound of the bell for dinner, the roommates playfully wrestle until they are late for the meal. They slip into the dormitory, where they read their English assignments and play their radio against school rules , until it is time for bed.
The novel opens with the narrator, Gene, returning to his old prep school Devon. Significantly, he makes his visit alone, not as part of an official homecoming or alumni reunion. The visit is private, his goal personal — to revisit two "fearful sites" from his youth. In encountering the past, Gene hopes to understand the crucial events that shaped his adulthood, in order to face them and finally move beyond them.
Gene's recognition of the changes in Devon shows the ways he himself has changed. The beauty of the campus still impresses him, even in a cold rain, but the school itself seems like "a museum," a place to observe rather than to inhabit. Gene has grown beyond his school and is no longer a part of it; yet the school and his memories of what happened here continue to shape him in ways he feels compelled to explore and finally to understand.
The two "fearful sites" Gene visits — a marble staircase inside the First Academic Building and a tree by the river — sharply contrast with each other. The tree, gnarled and old, represents an integral part of nature, simplicity itself, while the marble staircase, beautifully formed and decorated, expresses a highly polished culture. The two sites seem to show the double nature of Devon — natural landscape and rich interiors. The narration makes clear that the tree and the stairs hold great, even terrifying significance for Gene, but the chapter gives no indication of what might have happened here.
Gene's past, the narrator hints, somehow unites these two very different places. The intriguing combination sparks curiosity about the story that will unfold in the novel. Gene contemplates the "hardness" of the marble stairway in the First Academic Building and then takes an intent walk toward the tree through the rain and fog — a trek that ruins a pair of expensive shoes in the mud.
This sacrifice emphasizes the importance of his visit, just as his determined push to the river represents a journey into the past, the mud symbolizing the messy, unresolved events from long ago that stick to him, and even threaten to pull him down. The school bell rings, signaling dinner, and Finny trips Gene and wrestles him to the ground. After they get up, Gene walks faster, and Finny teases him for wanting to be on time for dinner.
Gene tackles him, and they wrestle each other in the twilight while the others run ahead. Realizing now that their wrestling has indeed made them quite late for dinner, Finny and Gene skip the meal and go straight to their room to do homework. Although Gene has deliberately returned to Devon, in many ways his purpose seems to be to prove the impossibility of true return: he wants things to be different on this visit to his old school; he wants to have a sense that time has passed—and erased, we assume—the dark events of his high school years.
Thus, he feels disconcerted at how new and varnished the school looks, as if it had been frozen in time since the days when he attended.
As the novel progresses, the reader gradually comes to realize what it would mean to Gene if he had not moved beyond the person he was during his high school years. The flashback that begins midway through this first chapter and lasts throughout the entire novel creates an odd effect: once the narrative drops us back into the s, the story seems to be told from the perspective of the younger Gene; yet the narrator frequently inserts commentary and philosophical musings that seem to come from the older Gene.
This shifting perspective is part of a larger complexity in A Separate Peace: namely, the problem of the unreliable narrator. While we can assume that Gene recounts external events relatively accurately, he seems less forthcoming about his own emotions and desires. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
If something can make a person go crazy, Finny says, it must be real. Gene is shocked to hear that Leper is back at Devon. Brinker asks Finny to explain in his own words what happened on the tree, and Finny reluctantly says that he lost his balance and fell.
Finny says that he thinks that Gene was at the bottom of the tree and Gene agrees that he was but that he cannot remember exactly what happened. But Finny then remembers that he had suggested a double jump and that they were climbing the tree together.
Gene struggles to defend the discrepancy between their stories. Finny quietly announces that he saw Leper slip into Dr. Gene tells himself that Leper is crazy and that even if his testimony implicates Gene, no one will ever accept it. After a while, the boys return with Leper, who seems strangely confident and composed.
The tribunal asks him what happened and he replies that he saw two people on the tree silhouetted against the sun and saw one of them shake the other one off the branch. Brinker asks Leper to name the people and to say who moved first but Leper suddenly clams up.
He becomes suspicious and declares that he will not incriminate himself.
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