Assignment 6 question 5 Katie Massie

5.) How does Gene feel about war and enlisting in this reading (look closely at pages 100-102)?

At the end of our reading, Gene begins to discuss his feelings about the war and enlisting. He says that he was, “used to finding something deadly lurking in anything I wanted,” (Knowles 101). This explains a lot about Gene’s former love of his relationship with Finny. He says that if there isn’t something dangerous there, he will put it there himself. By the end of the page, he has decided to enlist for the war. At the beginning of the book, Gene did not seem like the kind to love danger. But now to the reader, this does not seem so unlikely. After all, we’ve seen him cause for his best friend to fall off a tree and shatter his leg, so Gene’s innocence, and victim position is diminished. Gene’s character has gotten shadier and shadier and more and more bold. The best line is, “It was a night made for hard thoughts”, (Knowles 101), because it shows Gene’s inner strength to sit alone with only himself and to face all his thoughts about something as terrifying as enlisting full-on. He knows that it’s dangerous, but he is used to loving dangerous things. Gene knows this isn’t something he is being pressured into doing, but something that he brings upon himself. He is used to doing dangerous things because of spending time with Finny for years. And he decides faces things immediately. He says, “I owed it to myself to meet this crisis in my life when I chose, and I chose now.” (Knowles 102). Gene brings a huge amount of courage up from inside himself, something that takes many people twice his age years to learn how to do.