Themes In The Wars By Timothy Findley

Timothy Findley's The Wars is a piece of modern literature which depicts the vividness of the First World war and its implications. The novel is unique in that it violates the normal chronological presentation of events by incorporating flashbacks, which are communicated through the perspectives of multiple characters. Also, the complexity of the novel lies in rigid connections between the major themes presented such as war, animals, and privacy. To begin, the loss of innocence is a prominent theme which inevitably arises from the background of war. Intuitively, the loss of innocence can be defined as any process that helps to widen the observation of cruelties, tragedies, and injustice which are embedded in the world. The loss of innocence

People who are innocent remain naive and optimistic under the fake reality in which human convention has established. The loss of innocence is a necessary process for the realization of the failures of human convention exemplified in the cruelties of war, the destruction of nature, and the depreciation of the value of life.

It's clear that war can be logically associated with the loss of innocence as it is a gruesome form of reality. In war, there are corrupt rules in which soldiers have to abide by. One of which is the rule that "no one went back - even for a dying comrade" (Findley 118). Certainly, this statement is notorious for demonstrating the immoral nature of the human conventions of war. Not only does this questionable military law degrade humanity in a way such that it erases the higher quality of behavior that humans are assumed to possess, it also disregards human compassion as it implies that the objective of the war is far more important than human lives. In addition to degrading humanity, the conventions of war also destroy human civilization. Asides from the rules of warfare, war itself is a human construct which opposes the civilization

Life in any form is an embodiment of hope, and the conventions of war devalue life. The convention suggests that taking lives should be an easy task for a "war hero" to complete. Taffler demonstrates this convention as he "took aim and threw a stone. It arrived and the bottle was demolished" (Findley 29). The act of killing people can be euphemized to destroying bottles, the act of shooting a gun can be represented by throwing a stone, and the entire act of war can be compared to knocking down bottles with stones. As Taffler reduces the act of war to destroying bottles, he is displaying very little of the moral self by comparing human life to a bottle that he could demolish with a stone. Additionally, Taffler loses innocence and becomes aware of his guilt which is amplifying proportionally to the amount of people he killed: "He must have been rubbing his wounds to make them bleed" (Findley 156). Taffler attempting suicide is indicative of the fact that humans cannot withstand the burden of being a killing machine, whose ideology is imposed by the convention to kill as many people as possible. However, humans are not mere killing machines but are rather compassionate beings capable of feeling guilt. In war, those who kill the most enemies become praised as war heroes, but this convention fails to realize that humans accumulate guilt and lose innocence as a response to performing and