4.) What is guilt? Do we all have it? Is it part of being human? Can someone live guilt free?
Guilt is an emotion that humans feel when they feel bad about something they did or did not do. I do not think that it is possible to live guilt free, since everyone does things that they regret. However, different people feel guilty about different things. For example, at first Gene doesn’t seem to be very guilty about pushing Finny out of the tree, but instead does everything he can to block it out, pretendingq it never happened. He says, “ I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was” (Knowles 62). However, I think that this is another instance of Gene lying to himself, trying to get himself to no longer care. Guilt is the main emotion that keeps people from forgetting an experience where they did something wrong. He also lies to Finny and tries to manipulate his half-remembered version of the truth, even though Finny has a ‘feeling’ about what really happened in the tree. It was only after Finny apologized for suspecting Gene that the guilt really hits him, and he thinks "And I thought we were competitors! It was so ludicrous I wanted to cry. If Phineas had been sitting here in this pool of guilt, how would he have felt, what would he have done?” (Knowles 66). Gene then tries to assuage his guilt by telling Finny what really happened, but he ends up only hurting him more. By telling Finny, Gene did nothing to help either of them, since Finny now believes that his ‘best friend’ tried to kill him, and Gene knows that all he did was selfishly try to get rid of the burden of guilt by dumping it on Finny, thereby hurting him. Sometimes it’s better to keep a secret if you know that it could damage a relationship or hurt a person. Just because you feel like it would make you feel better doesn’t mean you should go ahead and do it. Life is full of mistakes and nobody’s perfect, so it is humanly impossible to live guilt free.
