oung child, his death is that of the credulity and ambitions that die as one becomes an adult.Elwin Lepellier, called Leper, may be a symbolic figure characterized by his homonym. A leper is both "...a person having leprosy..." and "...a person to be shunned or ostracized, as because of the danger of moral contamination." (Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia) His simplicity na?ly leads him to be a part of the war as he is convinced that all he will have to do as a soldier is ski. While sometimes frowned upon by his classmates, Leper is still a part of the senior class, unlike A Turn with the Sun which mentions "genuine outcasts" (A Turn with the Sun:12) Leper experiences some sort of trauma upon entering the military and returns early due to psychological difficulties. Knowles reflects his quandary in the weather, "...I could never see a totally extinguished winter field without thinking it unnatural. I would tramp along trying to decide whether corn had grown there in the summer, or whether it had been a pasture, or what it could ever have been, and in that deep layer of the mind where all is judged by the five senses and primitive expectation, I knew that nothing would ever grow there again." (A Separate Peace:139) Here the field symbolizes Leper; the weather is the war. This enhances the others' fear of going to war, "We members of the Class of 1943 were moving very fast toward the war now, so fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, a mind was clouded and a leg was broken - maybe these should be thought of as minor and inevitable mishaps in the accelerating rush. The air around us was filled with much worse things." (A Separate Peace:179) Gene sees the war as a destructive reality and feels the pain of losing a friend. He fears for himself and his classmates as he sees the inevitable war rushing toward him.The two works vary greatly, A Turn with the Sun is the author's passive third person expression of fi...
