Explication of Robert's Heroic Redemption

Robert's sensitivity is based in an inherent idealism that is forced into a process of actualisation by Roweena's death. He was absent when she fell, and his negligence was the original sin which drove him to on a mission to redeem himself. He sets about this in a struggle to preserving the vulnerable and innocent; whose essence is the same as the beloved sister he failed to protect. Polti's classification of "loved ones" are thus expanded to include the people and animals who Robert encounters, empathises with, and for whom he eventually sacrifices himself. Motivated by the remorse he feels at having abandonned his hydrocephalic sister - just like everyone else in his family and society had done - he sets out to prove to the world that innocence should exist in the world and that he could protect it. He fails often, but each time pushes him even harder into the identity of a hero fighting to redeem himself in the eyes of these lost loved ones.

When Robert was a child , he looked in the mirror pretending to see his skin was red. He took up running as a way to emulate his role model, Longboat, a Native athlete (Findley 43). Findley, writing only as an observer of Robert's actions, implies this affinity to be an indication of his ideals (Gaspar); he intuitively associated qualities such as autonomy and naturalist wisdom with these cultures. However, these are qualities which he cannot explore in city-life where an artificial sense of collectivism and and detachment from nature constitute the norm (Canada Britain Relationship).

This feeling of anomie becomes overpowering after the death of his sister: without her to protect, he had no reason to stay living a way of life to which he does not belong. So he enlists, but only to discover that the pervasive perversion of his society's values were even more askew in war: moving out to Europe, he was ordered to shoot an injured horse. The animal's life was just that dispendable. His instinct to protect him was subordinate to his the officer's command. He had to shoot the horse in order to establish an air of stoicism that would appease his superiors and conform to the contemporary conception of 'strength'. He has failed again. The murder of the helpless animal in a fly-filled hold is a traumatic experience which galvanises his resolve to never let life be treated like inconsequential externalities in the pursuit of human designs.

Robert's friend Harris underlines the interconnectedness of all life through a universal primordial essence; the sea that pulses through every vein. To Findley "humans are no better and no worse - no larger and no smaller than any other creature that walks, crawls, flies or swims, [we are] merely different." Harris dies with Robert at his bedside. The legacy Robert would carry of his friend is a profound patience and respect for his fellow soldiers and individual humans in general, but becomes increasingly deviant in his opinion of war as unjustifiable in the gross lack of respect it exhibits for the equality of all forms of life and their entitlement to exist.

Never does Findley describe Robert indiscriminately shooting at enemy lines. Once does Robert fire at another human being, and this is when he can look into the eyes of a German who, in a split second of panic, he thinks is going to fire at him (Findley, 131). While this murder is in self defence, it should never have happened. Men should not be accidentally killed like this. The murdered man is another vulnerable soul who represents the goodness he was trying to preserve. His murder of the German is a representation of how societal pressure perverts human instinct to false ends (McMurty). Robert was acting in the interest of his own survival when he killed this innocent man, just as every man who enlisted believed he was fighting in the interest of the human race. Trust that he would not be harmed by his official "enemy" was the German’s downfall. In war, the survival of none is guaranteed, but the death of the sensitive and trusting is certain. The murder of his German counterpart haunts Robert till the day of his own downfall, when he can no longer stand to live in a world where Honour and Justice become casualties. This murder is proof that if he does not actively protect, their destruction is his guilt at passively enforcing the status quo. He has only two choices; jam the machine or become a gear within it.

Robert’s society spat on the natural vulnerabilities of all animals, when it is exactly this quality in living things that should foster peace ans mutual sterwardship; symbiosis between all life. Robert could not fight for this kind of perversion, so, in his final act, he dies taking a stand against it (Findley 188). He is not guiltless – he has killed his sister by neglect, horses by obedience and another man by false instinct. His values and judgement had been was corrupted. However, in salvaging his ideals from the wreckage of his errors, from the deaths of his loved ones, he finds the resolve to sacrifice himself for the innocence he had thus failed to defend.