How is finny a christ figure

Two friends, Gene and Phineas nicknamed Finny , in a tree. Gene shakes a branch, Finny falls, breaks his leg, and the halcyon innocence of the summer ends. Previously a great athlete, Finny will never play sports again. As it becomes evident that he did, Finny leaves in a huff, falls down a set of marble stairs, and breaks his leg again.

Finny dies during the operation to set his leg. I mention this book because it is so full of symbolism. A period of innocence that ends with a fall at a significant tree. Post a Comment. Phineas consistently shows that he is the Christ Figure. Phineas, just like Christ, was in agony because of he was paralyzed. He had everything in the world going for him.

He had popularity, and a happy life. He may not have had the grades but he still pushed through it. Finny's game of blitzball, for example, expresses his essential nature with its spontaneous style of play and its rules made up on the run. For all of his immediacy, though, Finny appears to the reader only from Gene's perspective. As narrator, Gene shares his own feelings while observing Finny's actions and speech, but he never enters his friend's thoughts.

For example, Gene and the reader learns only late in the novel that Finny desperately wants to enlist in the military — any military — and that his fantasy about the fake war simply represents a way of hiding his pain.

Because Gene focuses so much on Finny, Finny himself assumes a paradoxical role in the story — neither narrator nor protagonist, yet still clearly central to the novel. And while most fictional characters come alive because they change over the course of the story, Finny's vitality emerges instead from the fact that he remains the same — his fundamental characteristics consistent from beginning to end.

From his clothes — especially that pink shirt — to his daring jumps from the tree, Finny flouts all the prep school conventions as the classic rebel in an overwhelmingly conformist world.