I Can Do Anything Better Than You

Competition is not just between two teams playing a sport. It could be between friends who are always competing against each other. In the novel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, two friends, Gene and Finny, struggle with the differences between them. Gene focuses more on his academics, while Finny focuses more on athletics. This creates an unspoken rivalry, causing competition. The competition between Gene and Finny lead to jealousy, which changed Gene’s judgment about Finny.
At first, Gene loved his friend Finny. He considered him his best friend and looked up to him because of his athletic abilities and how he was able to get out of trouble by talking himself out of it. He felt they were both equal because he was good in his academics and Finny was good at athletics. However, one night Gene and Finny were in their dorm room and Gene was studying for a trigonometry test he had the next day. Finny was telling Gene how he worked too hard and how he already knows all about History, English, French, etc. Therefore, that it would not make a difference if he failed Trigonometry. Finny stated to Gene that instead of studying really hard to graduate, he wants “to be head of the class, valedictorian, so [he] can make a speech on Graduation Day-in Latin or something boring like that probably-and be the boy wonder of the school” (51). This shows that Finny is getting jealous of Gene because he knows that he will never get the grades to be the head of the class, so he tries to convince Gene that it is not important. However, Gene catches on to this trick quickly. He is confused by why Finny would say something like that, since “he had won and been proud to win the Galbraith Football Trophy and the Contact Sport Award. If [he] was head of the class on Graduation Day and made a speech and won the Ne Plus Ultra Scholastic Achievement Citation, then [they] would both have come out on top, [they] would be even, that was all” (52). Gene is starting to think that Finny wants...