After reading the novel, would you classify the relationship between Finny and Gene as friendship? Support your reasoning with specific examples from the novel.

In my opinion, Finny and Gene were friends, though as young men, their friendship was definitely made up of some real and serious competition. Finny was far more easy going, and Gene read conspiracy into things that didn't warrant the extra examination. Regardless, their bond was built on more than an accident and guilt.

“Don’t give me that line. Nobody at Devon has ever been surer of graduating than you are. You aren’t working for that. You want to be head of the class, valedictorian, so you can make a speech on Graduation Day—in Latin or something boring like that probably—and be the boy wonder of the school. I know you.”
“Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t waste my time on anything like that.”
“You never waste your time. That’s why I have to do it for you.”
“Anyway,” I grudgingly added, “somebody’s got to be the head of the class.”
“You see, I knew that’s what you were aiming at,” he concluded quietly.

_____________________________________________________________________

Then a second realization broke as clearly and bleakly as dawn at the beach. Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies. That explained blitzball, that explained the nightly meetings of the Super Suicide Society, that explained his insistence that I share all his diversions. The way I believed that you’re-my-best-friend blabber! The shadow falling across his face if I didn’t want to do something with him! His instinct for sharing everything with me? Sure, he wanted to share everything with me, especially his procession of D’s in every subject. That way he, the great athlete, would be way ahead of me. It was all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it was all enmity.

_____________________________________________________________________

I could see through that. I was more and more certainly becoming the best student in the school; Phineas was without question the best athlete, so in that way we were even. But while he was a very poor student I was a pretty good athlete, and when everything was thrown into the scales they would in the end tilt definitely toward me. The new attacks of studying were his emergency measures to save himself.

_____________________________________________________________________