“A Separate Peace” by John Knowles holds a special meaning behind the title of the novel. With the story being set in World War 2, peace would be a hard thing to find in that era of time. The only thoughts people had in their minds were if they were going to live through the next day or if they were going to be leaving for the war. If you were a female, your husband or possibly one of your sons could leave for the war and never come back. The only word that crossed peoples’ minds during the war was violence, considering that that was the only way the war could be won anyway. But in the novel, violence rarely appear in the text. The students at Devon, including Gene and Finny, have found a separate peace from the war. They have isolated themselves from the violence of the war into a certain peaceful setting at the military school. Some of the students have been so used to the peacefulness that they have began to question if the war was even real. Gene and Finny face the violence of the war like teenagers at a high school face drama, they stray away from it.