John Knowles's concern with morality colors all his books. This preoccupation finds its most general expression in a question asked in Double Vision …, an informal travel journal: "Can man prevail against the bestiality he himself has struggled out of by a supreme effort?" Knowles's novels, instead of attacking the question head-on, go about it indirectly. They ask, first, whether a person can detach himself from his background—his society, his tradition, and the primitive energies that shaped his life.

The question is important because Knowles sees all of modern life shot through with malevolence. (p. 189)

[It is Knowles's major premise] that the condition of life is war. A Separate Peace describes the private battles of a prep school coterie boiling into the public fury of World War II. The individual and society are both at war again in Knowles's second novel, Morning in Antibes …, where the Algerian-French War...