IMPORTANT QUOTES
1. “We were the best of friends at that moment……I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn’t help envying him a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little.” (Page 18)
This
quote is important because right in the beginning of the story, I knew that
Gene is jealous of best friend Phineas and that Phineas has something that he
does not possess. There is no harm in envying your best friend, but the way that he
quoted this seemed like the author is foreshadowing. That in this case, there is
going to be harm in envying your best friend. Gene also states that he and
Phineas were the best of friends at that moment. It made me question why he
used a past tense, and why were they only best friends ‘in that moment’. This
quote made me predict that something bad was going to happen to their
friendship.
2. “The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant’s corner.” (Page 23)
This quote is describing Phineas. It allows me to know what kind of person he is. Just by this quote, I can assume that he always breaks the rule but gets away with it just because he is liked/ admired by so many. Because he gets away with things, I can see where Gene is coming from when he says he envies his best friend. Even from the beginning of the story, Phineas was the daredevil that jumped off The Tree first and always ignoring the rules and doing things his own way-Phineas had his own set of rules. “A model boy who was most comfortable in the truant’s corner.” Is the perfect way to describe him because a model boy means he is not flawed (in Gene’s perspective anyway) and saying he belongs in the truant’s corner is emphasizing how Phineas plays by his own set of rules.
3. “It was all cold trickery, I was all calculated, it was all enmity. I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better. We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.” (Page 54)
This quote describes Gene and how he is as a narrator. He is
confused about his own emotions and that makes him an unreliable narrator. Gene
has always been jealous of Phineas, but in this quote, he even goes as far as
telling himself it is enmity and that Phineas feels the same. He convinces
himself that Phineas is also competitive and this is when Gene starts believing
there is an actual rivalry going on between him and Phineas. I thought this is
interesting because Phineas, of course, had never once even thought about
envying Gene. This quote tells me that Gene has an unsteady, cautious,
love/hate relationship with Phineas.
“This at last penetrated my mind. Phineas had died from the marrow of his bone flowing down his blood stream to his heart.” (Page 194)
I found this quote to be very ironic. Phineas had died
during his surgery for a broken leg because a bone marrow had clogged his
heart. The way I interpreted this was that he basically died from a ‘broken heart’.
He found out that it was his own best friend that had jounced the limb of the
tree that caused him to never be able to do sports, walk, or join the army
again. Phineas had been such a good, true friend to Gene and it makes sense why
Phineas was so hurt and upset. This shows me that as athletic and virile as Phineas
seems, he is only human and gets emotionally hurt too.
5. “I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school. I killed my enemy there. Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. “(Page 204)
This quote is how Gene ends the story, and I thought it was
interesting. He talks about how he killed his enemy in school, but he never
says who. I can assume that the enemy is Phineas, but it makes no sense why
Gene would call Phineas his enemy even after he found out that Phineas never envied him. I can also assume that Gene’s enemy can possibly be his own inner thoughts telling
himself that Phineas is jealous of him. Either way, Gene goes on to say that
Phineas is different from everyone else. Even in a hostile war-zone, he still
manages to not hate anyone. That was just the kind of person Phineas is, he
never saw the bad in people like everyone else. He had his own rules, lived in
his own world, and had his own peace separated from everyone else.