The Wars Analysis
War is a dangerous game, many people would likely agree to this, however, very few have ever seen a battlefront. The truth is that war, no matter how awful we can imagine it, is always exponentially worse. In Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Robert Ross, the protagonist, faces a situation that he finds difficult to come to terms with, and when faced with a similar situation later on in the novel, he must take drastic measures to reconcile the uncertainties of the past situation. Timothy Findley suggests, through the life of Robert Ross, that one’s need to reconcile the uncertainties of past experiences dominate our actions when such situations come up again in our lives. In the words of Hiram Johnson, a US Senator during the First World War, “The first casualty of war is truth.” Throughout the novel, Robert realizes that the ‘truth’ of war, the propaganda that encouraged him to enlist is all a lie, and that war is infinitely worse than he ever expected it to be. It is this awfulness of war, combined with one particularity dire situation, that cause Robert to take drastic measures to reconcile his uneasy past when confronted with a new situation. Robert Ross, a young Canadian who enlisted in the army during the First World War, is presented at the outset as someone of high moral beliefs, and an overall intelligent, logical person. Robert’s logical nature shines through near the beginning of the novel, in a flashback to a situation with an old girlfriend of his at a party. His girlfriend insisted that Robert fight another man, as he had just confessed his love to her. Robert, on the other hand, “thought it was idiotic and said so.” Robert, thinking logically, found the suggestion that he fight another man solely because he claimed to ‘love’ his girlfriend, who didn’t even love him back absurd. Right from the beginning of the novel, Findley establishes Robert as a clear, logically thinking person who isn’t afraid to go against society’s status quo in favour of what he