Summary: Chapter 9
Gene feels a profound inner peace as he trains with Finny,
and he sometimes finds it hard to believe truly in the widespread
confusion of the war. To everyone’s surprise, Leper Lepellier, after
watching a documentary about ski troops, enlists in January, which
only makes the war seem even more unreal to Gene. Later, Brinker
starts the running joke that Leper must be behind any Allied victory.
Finny refuses to take part in these jokes, and as they come to dominate
the conversation in the Butt Room, both he and Gene stop going there. He
pulls Gene farther and farther away from his other friends until Gene
spends all his time with him, training for the Olympics.
One day, Finny decides to stage a winter carnival and
starts assigning tasks. Brinker organizes the transfer of equipment
from the dormitory to a park on the river and has his mousy roommate, Brownie
Perkins, guard several jugs of hard cider buried in the snow. The
boys arrange a little ski jump, snow statues, and prizes, and Chet
Douglass provides music on his trumpet. As the carnival begins,
the other boys wrestle the cider away from Brinker at Finny’s prompting
and break into anarchic carousing. Everyone seems intoxicated with
cider and life itself, especially Finny, who performs a wild yet
graceful dance on the prize table with his good leg. Finny announces
the beginning of the carnival’s decathlon and has Gene demonstrate
various feats of athleticism for the appreciative crowd. Amid the
festivities, Brownie reappears from the dormitory with a telegram:
Leper has written to Gene to say that he has “escaped” and that
his safety depends on Gene coming at once to his “Christmas location.”
[I]f Leper was psycho . . . the army
. . . had done it to him, and . . . all of us were on the brink
of the army.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary: Chapter 10
Gene immediately sets out for Leper’s “Christmas location,”
meaning his home in Vermont. He takes a train and then a bus through the
barren New England landscape and arrives in Leper’s town early the
next morning. He walks the rest of the way through the snow to Leper’s
house. All the while he refuses to admit to himself that Leper has
deserted the army; he tries to convince himself that by “escape,” Leper
has meant an escape from spies.
Leper stands at the window, beckoning Gene as he approaches, and
then bustles him into the dining room. Leper tells Gene that he has,
in fact, deserted; he did so because the army was planning to give
him a Section Eight discharge for insanity, which he says would have
prevented him from ever finding work or leading a normal life. Gene
makes a few uncertain comments and Leper suddenly breaks down, insulting
him. He then accuses Gene of knocking Finny out of the tree. Gene
kicks Leper’s chair over. Leper’s mother rushes into the room, declaring
that her son is ill and demanding to know why Gene would attack
a sick person. Leper then invites Gene to stay for lunch, which
he does out of guilt. At his mother’s suggestion, Leper goes for
a walk with Gene after the meal. Leper suddenly begins sobbing and
tells Gene of his odd hallucinations at training camp: officers’
faces turned into women’s faces, soldiers carrying detached limbs,
and so on. Eventually, Gene cannot bear to listen to Leper any longer
and runs away into the snowy fields.
Analysis: Chapters 9–10
Leper, who has been strictly a secondary character thus
far, suddenly takes center stage in the novel, first by joining
the army and then by deserting. Although Leper’s classmates react
with surprise, his decision is quite understandable. The war is
the great unknown for the students at Devon, one that they will
all have to face at some point. Leper, who is the oldest boy in
the class, will have to enter it sooner than anyone else. The film
about the ski troops gives him a chance to enter the war and the
unknown through something he knows well—skiing. His proactive decision
to enlist also offers him a sense of control and empowerment that
would be absent if he waited to be drafted into the service.
Leper’s decision affords the reader several insights into
his classmates, as the boys react in telling ways. First, they respond
with disbelief, and because they find the idea of Leper in the army
so unimaginable, the war becomes to them more distant and alien
than ever. Later, however, when they do begin to consider Leper’s
enlistment as a possibility, they turn the issue into a joke. Led
by Brinker, they mockingly envision Leper as a war hero. Gene himself
notes that by talking and laughing about Leper’s heroics, he and
his classmates are able to personalize the war. When they imagine
one of their peers involved in grand historical events, the war
suddenly seems more on their level, less intimidating; after all,
if Leper can be a hero, then anyone can. Thus, the boys’ anxieties
about wartime failure, about being “the Sad Sack, the outcast or
the coward,” can be set aside.
