Settings of The Wars
The setting in the novel “The Wars” by Timothy Findley is set during World War I in Canada and Europe. The war was the reality of that time, and this book talks about the life of a man named Robert Ross who decided to join the army. Findley used Robert’s character and the omniscient view of it to show the cruelty of war. When war happens, it affects everyone that is present. It affects not just an individual that goes into war; it also affects the loved ones around that individual. Though this novel is written in an omniscient point of view, Findley uses Robert as the main character above all heads to express the experiences he had in the army.
The Wars Timothy Findley Characters
The Wars by Timothy Findley is a 1977 novel about Robert Ross, a young Canadian officer who enlists in the military and fights in the First World War.The novel uses first, second, and third person narrative points of view. By switching between the different perspectives, the novel gives the reader the sense that they are a historian searching through archives, looking at photographs.
The Wars Timothy Findley Quotes
- The Wars by Timothy Findley. Upgrade to A + Download this LitChart! (PDF) Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on The Wars can help. By opening with this quote from Clausewitz on War, Findley foreshadows that characters in the novel will try to act as heroes, and that doing so will cause more harm.
- The Wars follows a young Canadian soldier named Robert Ross who is fighting in World War I. Although the main storyline takes place between 1915 and 1922, the narration occasionally switches to interviews with Juliet d’Orsey and Marian Turner (who knew Robert during the war) during the novel’s contemporary time period, roughly sixty years after World War I. Additionally, Findley inserts.
- A fanmade movie trailer for novel, The Wars by Timothy Findley. Clips from: Movies - The Poker House and War Horse, Music Videos - BTS and B.A.P.
Robert experiences restlessness and the hardship of a soldier. It was a dangerous war that most people did not understand. Soldiers were told to kill their enemies. As for Robert, his enemy was the Germans. Going into battle, there is no mercy. Corpses were everywhere, shells were being blown, air raids and guns were to be avoided. It was the colour of hell that he saw. Being in this situation was so dangerous that most people were scared of sleeping. Soldiers didn’t care if they were dead or alive, their orders were to eliminate the Germans and hope for the war to end.
No man can be the same after war. Robert was no longer the same naïve and kind man he used to be. His duty as a soldier put him in a setting of hell which later on made him dark, depressed and negative. If war was beautiful, maybe all veterans would come home being the same. But the setting of war is not. Through his experiences and where his experiences were set, in the end he was brainwashed by his memories to believe that life was not meaningful. It’s war.