In John Knowles's A Separate Peace,
Brinker is the "big man on
campus":
Brinker looked the standard preparatory school
article his gray gabardine suit with square, handsewn-looking jacket pockets, a
conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight
lines--eyebrows, mouth, nose, everything--and he carried his six feet of height straight
as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics,
arrangements, and offices.
There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker
unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The
flaps of his big gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that,
without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker's salient characteristic,
those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but defined and substantial buttocks.
[The implication here cannot be missed as Brinker than takes Gene to the Butt Room in
Chapter 7.]
Brinker treats
Gene like a prisoner when he takes him to the Butt
Room:
"Here's
your prisoner, gentlemen," announced Brinker, seizing my neck and pushing me..."I'm
turning him over to the proper
authorities."
In Chapters 7
and 11, the reader will find more passages in which Brinker is described with vocabulary
evocative of legality and court rooms. For instance, he raising "an arresting hand,"
and he "qualified judiciously" a statement. He acts as though he is a prosecutor, even
shouting "Liar!" at Gene, accusing him of "Trying to weasel out of it with a false
confession." Later, he ridicules Leper for wanting to photograph a beaver dam.
Certainly, he is sarcastic, as he leers also at
Quakenbush:
"Everybody in this place is either a
draft-dodging kraut or a...a..." the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a
curse, "a
nat-u-ral-ist!"
With
the old man who supervises the boys as they work to free the freight car immobilized in
the snow, the bossy Brinker acts as though he is the supervisor, asking the man if the
trains should not be called "unrolling
stock."
Leper, on the other
hand, is more genuine, although also more vulnerable and weaker. Gene describes him
as
the person
who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise, by this [the war and
the first snow of winter] and every other shift in our life at
Devon.
One day in the winter,
also in Chapter 7, Gene remarks that Leper looks like "a burlesque explorer" as he is
dressed for skiing, but not the fast downhill that others prefer. Leper says, "I just
like to go along and see what I'm passing and enjoy myself." Leper has to fight to
defend his way of thinking.
As one of his "vagaries,"
Leper is the first to join the army, "satisbying one of his urges to participate in
nature." Leper is wooed by the united States ski troops' film shown at school; Leper
explains that the war is the test to see "who've been evolving the right way
[to]survive."
Later, Gene learns that Leper has "escaped."
When Gene goes to his house, he notices Leper's
appearance:
he
looked at me, and I noticed the sleft side of his upper lip lift once or twice as though
he was about to snarl or cry. Then I realized that this had nothing to do with his mood,
that it was involuntary....I saw tears trembling in his
eyes.
Although he is broken
and filled with terror, Leper has the temerity to challenge Gene, who later admits that
Leper is "closer to the truth."
"You always were a lord of the manor, weren't
you? A swell guy, except when the chips were down. You always were a savage
underneath."
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