How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
In one of those restaurants before I was born my brother got under the table and slid his hands up and down the waitress's legs while she was bringing the food; it was during the war and she had on shiny orange rayon stockings, he'd never seen them before, my mother didn't wear them. A different year there we ran through the snow across the sidewalk in our bare feet because we had no shoes, they'd worn out during the summer. In the car that time we sat with our feet wrapped in blankets, pretending we were wounded. My brother said the Germans shot our feet off. (1.3)
World War II is referenced repeatedly throughout the novel. It seems to have quite an impact on the imaginations of the narrator and her older brother.
Quote #2
Anna was right, I had a good childhood; it was in the middle of the war, flecked grey newsreels I never saw, bombs and concentration camps, the leaders roaring at the crowds from inside their uniforms, pain and useless death, flags rippling in time to the anthems. But I didn't know about that till later, when my brother found out and told me. At the time it felt like peace. (2.9)
The narrator remembers having only the faintest awareness of World War II while she was growing up, even though it was going on at that time. However, as in the narrative, knowledge of the war's horrors ended up seeping in and having a significant presence and force in her thoughts.
Quote #3
It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything. (4.33)
Apparently the narrator's brother was pretty into the twin concepts of good and evil, which the narrator attributes to his knowledge about, and preoccupation with, the war.
Quote #4
He didn't dislike people, he merely found them irrational; animals, he said, were more consistent, their behavior at least as predictable. To him that's what Hitler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason. (6.37)
Hitler actually comes up a few times in the novel, suggesting that he still occupies a relatively important place in the narrator's imagination. Here, the narrator describes her father's perspective on Hitler's defining characteristic, which (according to him) wasn't evil so much as irrationality.
Quote #5
"A snooping base," he said, bird-watchers, binoculars, it all fits. They know this is the kind of place that will be strategically important during the war."
"What war?" I asked, and Anna said "Here we go." (11.48)
David apparently believes that the U.S. and Canada will go to war over the latter's water resources, so his theory is that some bird-watching Americans are there scoping things out and setting up a base. Anna seems to have heard this all before…
Quote #6
We reached the first portage at eleven. My feet moved over the rocks and mud, stepping in my own day-old footprints, backtracking; in my brain the filaments, trails reconnected and branched, we killed other people besides Hitler, before my brother went to school and learned about him and the games became war games. Earlier we would play we were animals; our parents were the humans, the enemies who might shoot or catch us, we would hide from them. (18.36)
Even before the narrator's brother brought the knowledge of war home from school, their games were conflict and violence oriented; in those days, it was about the conflict between the humans and the animals (a tension that the narrator still perceives in her present day).
Quote #7
I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with their coloured egg houses, sun and moon orderly above the flat earth, summer always, I wanted everyone to be happy. But his pictures were more accurate, the weapons, the disintegrating soldiers: he was a realist, that protected him. He almost drowned once but he would never allow that to happen again, by the time he left he was ready. (15.41)
The narrator seems to believe that, because she was into drawing peaceful things like eggs and bunny rabbits as a child, she was less of a "realist" than her brother, who was more into war-related imagery. The idea seems to be that violence is a part of reality, one that her brother confronted and she tried to escape.
Quote #8
The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted. (15.38)
As the narrator herself acknowledges, her extreme reaction to the dead heron seems a bit strange, given that there's a whole bunch of other serious stuff going on that barely gets a reaction out of her (like David's consistently bullying and jerky behavior, her conflicts with Joe, and oh yeah, her missing father). The senseless brutality of the heron's murder is what seems to get under her skin—like her father with Hitler, irrationality really bothers her. The narrator makes sure we're thinking about this moment through the lens of the war by a) bringing up wars and b) talking about the "trouble some people have being German," presumably in the wake of World War II.
Quote #9
They may have been sent to hunt for me, perhaps the others asked them to, they may be the police; or they may be sightseers, curious tourists. Evans will have told at the store, the whole village will know. Or the war may have started, the invasion, they are Americans. (25.2)
Later in the novel, when the narrator has hidden from the others and is adopting an animal lifestyle, she thinks to herself that perhaps the "Americans" have invaded Canada. Given the incident with the heron earlier, which she attributed to the "Americans" (who were actually Canadian), it seems she was already feeling that their country had been invaded by bad values.
Quote #10
I try to think for the first time what it was like to be them: our father, islanding his life, protecting both us and himself, in the midst of war and in a poor country, the effort it must have taken to sustain his illusions of reason and benevolent order, and perhaps he didn't. (26.11)
World War II pops up yet again, as the narrator considers how her father maintained his beliefs (and probably sanity) in light of things like war and poverty. Even out in the woods, it seems like he was not able to isolate himself and his family from knowledge of violence and unreason, if the preceding narrative was any indicator.