Abstract:

The term “ecological anti-war narrative” designates a literary practice that combines a war criticism with ecological consciousness. Its defining features are the foregrounding of the trauma inflicted upon the natural world as a whole rather than a sole focus on human casualties, interrogating the ethical foundations of the human-nature relationship rather than merely debating the justice of wars, and envisioning a mode of coexistence between human and nonhuman life rather than advocating peace in purely anthropocentric terms.Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars (1977) embodies the generative mechanism and ethical implications of this narrative mode. This novel constructs an ecological anti-war narrative through a threefold structure of “destruction, construction, and transcendence”. First, it depicts how war alienates nature from a “land of life” into a “space of violence”. Second, through the writing of oasis imagery and animal voices, the novel reconfigures nature as a symbolic site of trauma repair and spiritual refuge. Finally, it shows that in the symbiosis of the soul and nature, individual life transcends death and achieves immortality in an ethical sense, thereby calling for coexistence between human and nonhuman life. The ecological writing of The Wars reveals that imperial warfare entails not only the conquest of the “other”, but also the systematic domination of nature and nonhuman life. It is precisely through the lens of “ecological anti-war narrative” that this deeper nature of imperialist warfare becomes visible. Only by reconstructing a symbiotic relationship between humanity and the natural world can ethical foundations be reestablished amid the ruins of civilization.

Key words: Timothy Findley, The Wars, war violence, ecological writing, ecological anti-war narrative