In Knowles' novel, the boys of the Devon School, educated, with families that are comfortable, if not wealthy, choose enlistment in relatively prestigious (and safer) training programs in preference to the draft.īut, drafted or enlisted, the recruit had to look forward to the same period of basic training, when individual differences were supposed to be discarded to make way for the new group identity and goals. The smaller group - still, about five million - enlisted, and so could choose the branch of service they would join. Fifteen million American men joined the military during World War II, with universal service accepting virtually all young men 18 and older who stood taller than five feet and weighed more than 105 pounds.Ībout two-thirds (about ten million) of the men serving were drafted, and most of them were sent to the infantry, where they saw the worst of the war, and endured the highest casualty rate. World War II provides the novel's historical backdrop, a time when young men anticipated the enforced conformity and danger of war service. Like the novels Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye, as well as the film Rebel Without a Cause, A Separate Peace dramatizes the challenge of growing up to be a truly individual adult in a conformist world. Although set in World War II, the novel explores a crucial cultural theme of the '50s, the motivations of a young man making a troubled transition from childhood to adulthood.
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