Summary
In the moments following Finny’s crash on the staircase,
the boys behave with surprising presence of mind as they fetch the
wrestling coach, who lives nearby, to give Finny first aid; they
also send someone to Dr. Stanpole’s house. Dr. Stanpole arrives
and has Finny carried out on a chair. Dr. Stanpole tells Gene that
Finny’s leg is broken again but assures him that it is a much cleaner
break than last time. The crowd of boys breaks up and Gene sneaks
off to the infirmary to peek in and try to see what is going on.
He sits outside in the dark, imagining Finny saying absurd things
to the doctors and nurses, until finally the doctor and the other
adults leave, turning out the light in Finny’s room. Gene crawls
up to the side of the building and opens the window. Finny recognizes
him in the darkness and begins to struggle angrily in his bed, accusing
Gene of coming to break something else in him. He falls out of bed,
but Gene restrains himself from going into the room to help him
back up. Gene tells Finny that he is sorry and then leaves.
All through the night, Gene wanders the campus, thinking
that he can see a new level of meaning in everything around him
and feeling that he himself is nothing but a meaningless dream,
a “roaming ghost.” He falls asleep under the stadium, imagining
that its walls can speak, that they can say powerful things, but
that he, as a ghost, cannot hear them. The next morning, he returns
to his room before class and finds a note from Dr. Stanpole asking
him to bring some of Finny’s things to the infirmary. Gene packs
Finny’s suitcase and brings it to him. Finny’s voice betrays no
emotion, but as he looks through the suitcase, Gene sees that his
hands are shaking. Finny tells Gene that all winter he has been
writing to various military branches all over the allied world,
begging to be allowed to enlist but that all of them have rejected
him because of his leg. He says that the reason he kept telling
Gene that there was no war was that he could not be a part of it.
Gene tells Finny that he would never have been any good in the war
anyway because he would have gone over to the other side and made
friends and gotten everyone confused about whom they were fighting.
Finny bursts into tears and says that some sort of blind
impulse must have seized Gene on the tree those many months ago,
that he hadn’t known what he was doing. He asks Gene to confirm
that it was some impulse, not some deep feeling against Finny, that
took hold of him that day; Gene answers that some “ignorance” or “crazy
thing” inside him made him jostle the limb. Finny assures him that
he understands and believes Gene. The doctor tells Gene that he
is going to set the bone this afternoon; Gene can come back that
evening after Finny comes out of the anesthesia. Gene goes about
his day mechanically and comes back to the infirmary at the appointed
time. Dr. Stanpole finds him in the hall outside Finny’s room and
tells him that Finny is dead. As Gene listens numbly, the doctor
explains that a bit of marrow escaped from the bone as he was setting
it, entering Finny’s bloodstream and stopping his heart. Gene doesn’t
cry, not even later at Finny’s funeral. He feels that, in some way,
it is his own funeral as well.
Analysis
Gene’s nighttime wanderings lead him to a tragic realization.
As he floats aimlessly, he comes to recognize that he has no sense
of himself, no sense of his own identity or being. Gene has spent
so much of the novel losing himself in Finny that, once severed
from him, he feels himself to be a ghost, departed from the world
of the living. This spectral existence renders him deaf to the profound
lessons that his world has to teach him; it cuts him off from a
meaningful life. Thus, he tells us that the landscape “speaks” to
him but that he cannot hear its messages.
It is difficult to know what to make of the interaction
between the two friends on the following day. At night, when Gene
comes to Finny’s window, Finny lashes out at him; but the next day,
Finny is ready to forgive, ready to believe that what happened on
the branch arose from a sudden, uncontrollable urge that Gene could
not control—that it had nothing to do with their friendship. The
reader is left uncertain as to whether Finny really believes this
idea or is simply forcing himself to believe. If he were to believe
that Gene really harbored some deep resentment toward him, he would
have to give up Gene’s friendship, a prospect that he considers
too painful. Similarly, when Gene eagerly joins Finny in attributing
the jounce to blind impulse, we are left to question the extent
to which he believes this idea. Again, Gene, ever the problematic
narrator, withholds information: he tells us what he says to Finny,
but characteristically, he does not tell us his thoughts.
Ultimately, by refusing to resolve the matter definitively,
the novel forces the reader to contemplate the subtleties of the
story. That is, unable to determine the truth behind Finny’s fall,
we must base considerations of Gene’s seeming guilt on other elements.
His mindset prior to the fall—his feelings of rivalry and envy—would seem
to render Gene guilty regardless of whether or not he consciously
jostled the branch. For example, if he wished for harm to come to
Finny, even if not at the specific moment in the tree, then this
malevolent intention would cost him our trust and lead us to believe
that he might well have been responsible for the accident. Gene’s
devotion to Finny after the accident, however, would seem to exonerate
him. On the other hand, one can argue that this devotion arises
out of Gene’s deep shame, which may itself be considered in various
lights. His shame seems to point to his guilt, yet perhaps his intense regret
and self-hatred have sufficed as atonement for his misdeed.
