Notes

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Gene Forrester, the narrator of the story, returns to the Devon School in New Hampshire, fifteen years after being a student there. He walks around the campus and notices that everything seems well preserved, as if a coat of varnish had been applied to the buildings, keeping them just as they were during his time there. He reflects on how fearful he was in those days—the early 1940s, while World War II raged in Europe—and decides to visit the two places that he most closely associates with that fear. The first is a marble staircase in one of the academic buildings, which Gene decides must be made of incredibly hard stone, since the depressions created by students’ feet over the years are still shallow. After staring at these steps for a time, he goes back outside, passing the dormitories and the gymnasium, ruining his shoes as he trudges across the soggy playing fields in the rain. He eventually reaches the river and searches for a specific tree on its banks, which he locates with some difficulty in a grove of trees similar to each other. He identifies his tree by a number of scars on its trunk and by the way that one of its branches sticks out over the river. He reflects that this tree now seems so much smaller than it did during his youth.

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Mr. Patch-Withers, the substitute headmaster, holds tea that afternoon. Most of the students and faculty converse awkwardly; Finny, on the other hand, proves a great conversationalist. As Mr. Patch-Withers enters into a discussion with Finny about the bombings in Europe, his wife notices that Finny is wearing the school tie as a belt. Gene waits tensely in expectation of Finny’s reprobation, but Finny manages to talk his way out of the display of disrespect, accomplishing the impossible feat of making the stern Mr. Patch-Withers laugh. For a moment, Finny’s escape from trouble disappoints Gene, but he pushes the emotion aside, and the two boys leave the party together laughing. Finny suggests a jump from the tree and pushes Gene along toward the river. Finny declares that he refuses to believe that the Allies really bombed central Europe, and Gene concurs. They swim for a while in the river, and Finny asks if Gene is still afraid of the tree. Gene says that he is not, and they agree to form a new secret society—the “Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session.” When they get out on the limb, Gene turns back to Finny to make a delaying remark and loses his balance. Finny catches him, and then they both jump. It occurs to Gene that Finny may have saved his life.

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Thinking back on the near-disaster, Gene decides that while Finny may have saved his life, he wouldn’t have been up in the tree in the first place if it weren’t for Finny. He feels, therefore, that he owes Finny no real gratitude. That night, the Super Suicide Society gets off to a successful start as Finny convinces six other boys to sign on as inductees. Finny invents a list of rather arbitrary rules, including one that requires him and Gene to start each meeting by jumping out of the tree. Gene hates this rule and never loses his fear of the jump. Nonetheless, Gene attends every one of the nightly meetings and never contests the rule. Finny, who loves sports above all else, is disgusted with the summer session’s athletic program, especially the inclusion of badminton, and spontaneously invents a new sport called “blitzball” one afternoon. The game utilizes a medicine ball that Finny has found lying around; competition in the game is not between two perpetually divided teams but rather shifts as the ball is passed from player to player. Whichever boy possesses the ball at a given moment becomes the target for the other players, who try to tackle him; the boy may try either to outrun the others or pass the ball off to another boy. The game produces no real “winner.”

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After he and Finny sleep on the beach, Gene awakens with the dawn. Finny wakes up soon after and goes for a quick swim before they head home. They arrive just in time for Gene’s ten-o’clock test in trigonometry, which he flunks. It is the first time that he has ever failed a test, but Finny gives him little time to worry about it: they play blitzball all afternoon and have a meeting of the Super Suicide Society after dinner. That night, Gene tries to catch up on his trigonometry and Finny tells him that he works too hard. Finny suspects him of trying to be class valedictorian, which Gene denies. Suddenly, however, he realizes that he does, in fact, want to be valedictorian so that he can match Finny and all of his athletic awards. Gene asks Finny how he would feel if he achieved the honor. Finny jokingly replies that he would kill himself out of envy; Gene feels that the jocular tone is a mere screen, however, and that there is some truth to Finny’s words. Believing that the envy in their relationship is mutual, Gene now perceives a rivalry that he never recognized before. Highly disturbed, he concludes that all of Finny’s overtures of friendship and insistence that Gene participate in all of his diversions are calculated to thwart him in his achievement of academic success comparable to Finny’s athletic success.