The title “A Separate Peace” is chosen by the author because being in an all boy’s military school has to extremely grueling both physically and mentally, and in that environment, one must find a separate peace to remain sane.

However, this doesn’t seem to help much at first for the narrator, Gene, who’s separate peace resides with Finny, his best friend who is also his greatest enemy. This “frenemy” is his peace because he can always find the Finny Logic in all things, saying that they aren’t real if they don’t suit his fancy. This appeals to Gene in an uncanny way that makes him torn between thinking of finny as his enemy or his savior, but nonetheless, this man is still his repose from the war. This is strange becuase he indirectly-on-purpose-except-not-really kills him; him the charismatic independent thinker. But at this point in the book, we find that gene has truly found peace with the world and with Finny- as if “Finny had absorbed it and taken it with him, and [Gene] was rid of it forever.”

Gene found a peace that no one else had found; “All others at some point found something in themselves pitted violently against something in the world around them” and Gene is the only one who was rid, woth his death, of his violence (against Finny). His personal war is over for he, the only force on earth capable of inflicting damage on Finny, finally broke him.

(There is also another peace that other characters sought comfort in. For example, Leper seeks peace in the nature surrounding the school and eventually outside of Devon in the war, but his eager eye betrayed him, and he succumbed to the madness of war, and the very thing he sought refuge in tricked him into handing over his sanity, and the case is similar with most others at Devon as well.)