But Leper's visions — like Snow White with Brinker's face — virtually paralyze him, and his other delusions — of men turning into women, the arm of a chair becoming a human limb — reduce him to hysteria. Leper's perceptions of the real world behind the war are psychotic and destructive — not imaginative and creative, like Finny's.
Finally, the details of Leper's breakdown — the first reality of the war that might await the Devon boys — prove too much for Gene to take. In Chapter 9, Gene sits absorbed during Finny's rambling explanation of the fake war, and rises to the challenge of the dreamlike 1944 Olympics, but here he withdraws suddenly from the confiding Leper, shouting, "I don't care!"
The horrible vision of wartime psychosis, so close after Finny's separate peace of the Carnival, terrifies Gene, and he abandons his friend in the snow, fleeing him, literally, as he would a leper.
