Quote 49
But examinations were at hand. I wasn't as ready for them as I wanted to be. The Suicide Society continued to meet every evening, and I continued to attend, because I didn't want Finny to understand me as I understood him (4.42).
This statement soon becomes ironic when we realize that Gene has got Finny completely wrong.
Quote 50
For a moment I was almost taken in by it. Then my eyes fell on the bound and cast white mass pointing at me, and as it was always to do, it brought me down out of Fanny's world of invention, down again as I had fallen after awakening that morning, down to reality, to the facts (8.98).
Earlier in the novel, we saw that Finny could charm his way out of any predicament, talk Gene into anything. But this ability, too, has been crippled by his fall.
Quote 51
Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence (1.3).
Is sixteen-year-old Gene really unaware of fear? This seems pretty inconsistent with his behavior…Can you say "unreliable narrator"?