In an attempt to stop Teddy, Robert is beaten up. His mother orders Robert to kill the rabbits after Rowena's death when he refuses, his father hires Teddy Budge to kill the rabbits. Robert feels guilty because he was unable to save her since he was making love to his pillows in his bedroom when he should have been watching her. Robert Ross enlists in the army to escape the guilt he feels after the recent death of his sister, Rowena, who died from falling out of her wheelchair while playing with her beloved rabbits in the barn. He decides to free a herd of horses from the train, and the prologue ends with the horses, rider, and dog all running as a herd.

Robert, the horse, and the dog seem to have been together for a while, as they understand each other. There is evidence of war, and Ross is shown to be in the company of a black horse and a dog. A nearby building is on fire, and a train is stopped. The novel is also an example of historiographic metafiction.Ī young man named Robert Ross is introduced as squatting in a tattered Canadian military uniform, with a pistol in hand. The narrative moves between voices, each telling part of Robert's story. The Wars utilizes first-, second-, and third-person narrative points of view, which is very rare in literature. Drawn into the madness of war, Ross commits 'a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.' Years later, a historian tries to piece together how he came to commit this act, interviewing the various people Ross interacted with. The Wars is a 1977 novel by Timothy Findley that follows Robert Ross, a nineteen-year-old Canadian who enlists in World War I after the death of his beloved older sister in an attempt to escape both his grief and the social norms of oppressive Edwardian society.

The Wars by Timothy Findley