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Throughout A Separate Peace, it's most recognizable familiarity was that the main character, Gene Forrester, followed an intellectual odyssey that foreshadowed the Hero Journey archetypal pattern. Undergone Gene's reliving experience of his days at Devon School, it was most obvious that he began in his own, known world where he was in control of all around him and then as tests and trials of his self-composure surfaced, Gene transformed into holding a better understanding of himself through his spiritual healing and return to the "new" world. Thus, due to Gene Forrester's succession of his intellectual odyssey, A Separate Peace had a high applicabilty of the Hero Journey archetype. With knowledge of Joseph Campbell's form and ideas of the Hero Journey archetype, there was a clear appliance of it to Gene's intellectual odyssey in A Separate Peace. Similarily to his first stage: a beginning in the known, safe world, we are first encountered with Gene, as a light-hearted, sixteen-year old with no worries. Despite the fact that war was going on, Gene lived a carefree life "calmly, numbly reading Virgil and playing tag in the river downstream" (7). To Gene and the boys, there was no need for fear or need to enroll in the war because there was no real war, the "bombs in Central Europe were completely unreal to us here...our place was too fair for us to accept that. We spent the summer in complete selfishness" (23). For Gene specifically, why would he need to worry? He was a confident, social, and well educated teenage boy with good social status in school. He also had his own sense of identity about himself.Overall, he and his friends reminded people of what peace was like. Like Gene says, they "could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve" (17). But, all that was about to change... Gene's life could be considered quite content, almost perfect. And then surfaced the call to adventure, related to the Hero Journey archetype. But, take his life and all his downfalls, what is to be realized is that Finny, Gene's "roommate and best friend" (32), had all Gene does except Gene's downfalls, like sports for example, were Finny's superiorities. Because of this, Gene turns out to become very jealous of Finny and discovered his "deadly rivalry" (46) for him.
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