Gene and Finny’s friendship is very complicated. Sometimes Finny and Gene act and seem like they are best friends and would do anything for each other. At other times, it seems like they aren’t really true friends and are just acting like they are friends on the outside. Readers can especially see this in the first few chapters of the novel when Gene gave his thoughts on the incidents that occurred when he was a student at Devon. Gene and Finny’s friendship changed quite a bit from before Finny fell from the tree and after Finny fell from the tree.
Before Finny fell from the tree, Gene’s emotions towards Finny varied quite a bit. In the beginning of the novel, it seemed like Gene and Finny were really best friends by the way they were acting…show more content… When Gene tried studying for his French exam one night, Finny told Gene that they had to go to the tree for one of the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session meetings. Leper had claimed that he was going to jump from the tree, and Finny insisted that they had to go see it. Gene lost it, and he started saying how he needed to study. Then, Finny explained to Gene how he never knew that he actually needed to study, and then he told Gene that he shouldn’t go to the tree and that he should just study. Gene realized that he was wrong about Finny all along and that he was so much below Finny to even think that Finny would try to sabotage him. Gene ended up going to the tree with Finny where Finny said they should do a double jump, most likely to ease the tension between them. When they were on the tree branch, Gene’s emotions overpowered him which caused him to jounce the branch and cause Finny to fall. Gene couldn’t stand the fact that he was wrong about Finny all along, which made him the bad guy. He even said, “Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he. I couldn’t stand this” (Knowles
