A leper is both "...a person suffering from leprosy..." and "...a person to be avoided or ostracised, due to the danger of moral contamination." (Compton Interactive Encyclopedia) His simplicity naively leads him to take part in the war because he is convinced that all he will have to do as a soldier is ski. Although sometimes disapproved of by his classmates, Leper is still part of the senior class, unlike A Turn with the Sun which mentions the "true outcasts" (A Turn with the Sun: 12). Leper experiences some sort of trauma when he enters the army and soon returns due to psychological difficulties. Knowles reflects on his dilemma about the weather, "...I could never see a dead winter field without thinking it unnatural. I wandered about trying to decide whether corn had grown there in the summer, or whether it had been a pasture, or what could ever being, and in that deep layer of the mind where everything is judged by the five senses and primitive expectations, I knew that nothing would ever grow there again." (A Separate Peace:139) Here the field symbolizes the leper; time is war. This increases others' fear of going to war: "We members of the Class of 1943 were moving very fast towards war now, so fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, minds were clouded and a leg broken - perhaps these should be considered minor and