Compare and Contrast Essay on the Kite Runner and a Separate Peace

bob
bob
Precollege Writing, period 4
2012 April 3
Friends don’t last forever
People all have to make decisions in life.   Some easy and some difficult.   In the book A Separate Peace, the author’s intent is to show how the decisions we make can affect the rest of our lives.   He wanted to show how emotions can get in the way of friendship and ruin it.   Like A Separate Peace, The Kite Runner shows how emotions affect relationships.   In both pieces, someone gets hurt because of the bad decisions made by their friend.   The novel and movie both show similar themes of friendship where someone got hurt and they felt guilty, but also show different themes of coming of age where there was a loss of innocence.
To start, one theme that the pieces have in common is friendship.   Friendship was used in both in a way where one friend did harm to the other and they felt guilty for it.   In The Kite Runner, Amir says that he is “taking the boy home with [him]” (movie).   Amir showed that he cared about Hassan by taking care of his son.   In the book, A Separate Piece, Gene shows that he cares about Finny when he “came up close beneath the window of Finny’s room” to see if he was ok (Knowles 184).   Gene knew that Finny was mad so he showed that he cared by telling him he was sorry.   Both Gene and Amir had to try and make things right with their friend even if it was hard to do.  

On the other hand, there are differences in the theme of friendship.   In the kite runner, Amir actually went back and was able to do something for his friend Hassan.  

To conclude, there are similarities from both stories in the themes of coming of age, and friendship.   Like the boys in both pieces, every young person has to go through this challenge to try to get along with their peers.