Wit & Attitude Quote by John Knowles

Knowles turns nostalgia into an accusation, and he does it with that slippery first-person plural: we. The sentence starts like a tidy memoir of wartime adolescence - mature, responsible - then undercuts itself by contrasting earlier generations of boys who got to convert restlessness into action. Those kids could "raise hell or enlist or both", a phrase that makes rebellion and patriotism feel like adjacent doorways. Knowles's boys, by comparison, are trapped in the strangest theater of war: the classroom, where duty looks like homework and courage looks like compliance.

The intent isn't to praise studiousness; it's to expose how World War II reorganized masculinity and agency for those not yet old enough to fight. The subtext is a simmering envy of the clean narrative other wars offered: the chance to prove yourself, to become legible as a man through risk. "Dutifully" is the tell - not just obedient, but conscripted into normalcy. Their responsibility is "surprisingly" responsible because it's not entirely chosen; it's what you do when history is thundering outside and the only sanctioned response is to keep your head down.

In context, this is Knowles's signature terrain: adolescence as a pressure cooker where external conflict seeps into private rivalries, self-mythmaking, and moral confusion. The war becomes an offstage force that still drafts everyone, even the boys left behind, into a performance of steadiness that doesn't quite fit.