Quote 25
His eyes were furious now too, glaring blindly at me. "What do you know about it, anyway?" None of this could have been said by the Leper of the beaver dam (9.31).
Gene can only deal with Leper's madness by stripping him of his identity.
Quote 26
This touched an interesting point Phineas had been turning over in his mind for a long time. […] "It's very funny," he said, "but ever since then I've had a feeling that the tree did it by itself. It's an impression I've had. Almost as though the tree shook me out by itself" (11.138).
If Gene has no identity, as he later believes when wandering the campus as a "ghost," then this is, in an odd way, true. Gene wasn't Gene when he shook the branch.
Quote 27
My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself (12.7).
We know why Gene is interested in abandoning his identity and assimilating that of Phineas (that would be the gut-wrenching guilt), but why is Phineas interested in turning Gene into a version of himself?