Robert Ross Character Analysis

Soniea Khameneh
Mrs.Taylor
ENG4U
October 20, 2014
Findley uses many techniques throughout the story to develop Roberts character, such as using other charcters and literary tools .
One of the devices used, is a story-within-a-story which is used to illustrate how personality goes beyond basic forces even while being destroyed by them. He is befiddled by the behaviour of Robert Ross, a young Canadian officer, who enlists as a German offensive during the Great War, attempts and fails to rescue one hundred and thirty horses from being killed.

Robert's misfortune leaves him horribly burned, and in many ways is simply an inevitable motif that Robert is bagaged with. However, the narrator tends to portray Robert as a helpless child weak in

Having an ineffectual father, a mopy, alcoholic mother, and a hydrocéphalie sister all unify, to ceiling Robert's potential. Mrs. Ross recalls Robert's habit of falling down as a child, and how he was always the only one that would get bruised where nothing happened to the other kids, foreshadowing his more serious falls during the war, and his inability to save Rowena's rabbits from his mother's death sentence anticipates his later failure to save the horses. His mother enters the bathroom while Robert is bathing : "Mrs. Ross — closing the toilet seat — sat down. She used the sink as an ashtray, carefully rolling the ashes off along its edge and watching them fall down the porcelain slopes like mountain climbers tumbling to their death. She shivered." As Robert approaches his confrontation with fire and death in the war, Mrs. Ross’s health is progressively declining, until she is being pushed about in her dead daughter's wheelchair. The dark bedroom where she sits greiving resembles the dark room where Robert is raped by his fellow mates; she is blinded by alcohol, he is blinded by fire. Despite Mrs. Ross being unable to affect her son's decision to enlist, she does have an absolute influence on his view of human relationships. For instance she tells him, "...no one belongs to anyone. We're all cut off at birth with a knife and left at the mercy of strangers. You hear that? Strangers. I know what you want to do. I know you're

. ." Similarly, when Robert leaves England for France, Barbara does not speak to him : "Instead, she stood at the top of the stairs and watched him from behind the glass." emphasize that the war is merely the occasion, rather than the cause of Robert's destruction. Everywhere, it seems to be raining — a heavy, unwholesome rain that brings no promise of renewal. Everywhere, too, there are terrible fires : the fires burning in the Ross factories, the fires destroying the Parliament Buildings, the fires turning Flanders into a holocaust. "Horses fell with their bones on fire. Men went blind in the heat." As Robert moves through this fearful world, his immediate environment becomes increasingly claustrophobic, changing from the relative freedom he enjoys on the prairies (as shown by his run with the coyote), to the oppressive squalor of the voyage overseas, to the deadly enclosure of the trenches. Eventually he can no longer even dream, much less run free : "All he wanted was a dream. Escape. But nobody dreams on a battlefield. There isn't any sleep that long."

Like a child, Robert usually is shown responding to physical forces and the pressures of the moment, rather than acting on the basis of any elaborate plan. Thus, his visit to the brothel is not a success: "Robert had ejaculated coming up the stairs. His body hadn't waited for his mind. It did things on its