[A closer look at La Guerre, Yes Sir!] suggests that its wide appeal may come less from a regional social realism than from the universal themes around which Carrier builds his fable, themes as true for Europeans and Americans as for Canadians. Carrier dedicates the novel (which he says he has "dreamed") "to those who have perhaps lived it." The vividness of his treatment of the lives of his Quebec villagers during World War II often resembles the grotesque, slightly enlarged scenes of dream and nightmare. But his themes, though mirrored in the concreteness of the French Canadian village, are concerned with the issues of our time: the hatred of war and the impossibility of being isolated from it; the failure of the Church to deal with problems of faith, or morality, and of alienation; the difficulty of relating to other cultures in the global village; and above all, the strange, stimulating presence of death as a means to authentic existence in life itself. These are not trivial themes, nor are they of concern only to French Canadians. (p. 43)

Throughout the novel we are kept aware of the villagers' religion—a popular form of Catholicism, to which the older people cling for comfort. The younger people are more inclined to use its sacred terms—hostie, calice, tabernacle, crucifice, etc.—in their blasphemies. The theological implications of prayers for the dead rise to the surface now and then: Corriveau was not bad enough to be burned in hellfire for ever, but he was bad enough to be burned in purgatory for quite a while, and God, who put him in the milder flames for his purification, will take him out sooner if they all keep repeating their garbled, nonsensical prayers. No wonder they need frequent draughts of cider to keep them at it. (p. 44)

The many parallels Carrier establishes between the war and the Church convey his criticism of this the dominant institution of the village. Through images too he links the Church to the life-diminishing forces of the community. The holy water freezes as the priest sprinkles Corriveau's grave. In the warped mind of Henri the Church and death are so closely associated that Corriveau's coffin becomes the ark into which the whole world enters. The nun with her thin smile and sharp teeth appears like a vulture peering in through the open window from the dark cold winter night on to the mourners, "whose sweat turned to ice on their backs." (pp. 44-5)

The book is founded on a paradox and itself participates in the paradox which it discovers to us, namely, that it is death which teaches us to appreciate life, just as hunger makes us appreciate food, and absence makes the heart grow fonder. Carrier has observed that the villagers are never so enamoured of life as when they are celebrating a wake. He therefore makes his novel the story of a wake. But paradoxically, the book, like the wake, turns out to be a celebration of life. The characters, who may at first sight appear to be a bunch of warped individuals, full of frustrations and inhibitions, turn out, on better acquaintance, to have a healthy love of life—and more common sense than the Church.

The bilingual title of the novel reflects the division between Canadian cultures but also the more essential thematic conflict between the negative force of death and the positive affirmation of life. Through Carrier's mastery of the technique of the modern fable, the war of the title takes on the implications of the war of life itself, with its division between man and woman, man and his God, man and himself, father and son. But the pessimism of the novel does not stem from the recognition that this is a condition of life. The blackness of La Guerre, Yes Sir! arises from the inexorable advance of what man seeks most to avoid, namely death, through the very agencies which man has created, Church and State, agencies which he may hate but cannot entirely avoid….

In [the] last novel of Carrier's trilogy, Is it the sun, Philibert? there are many echoes of La Guerre. Molly, who faded against the snow, reappears in Philibert's nameless love, the English matron who gives him happiness along with food and sex, but whose home disappears as "streets … stretched out, crossed one another, made knots, formed letters that could only be deciphered from the sky …" and Philibert feels "the immense hand of the city … closing up." Now instead of thinking the city should have been called Bonheur, he fears "he would be crushed between these streets that looked so much alike," for "he had no idea where to find the house of the woman who had changed his life." (p. 46)

The echoes make all the more striking the contrasts between the two novels. Gone is the warmth and vitality of the gatherings in La Guerre, which mitigated the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Corriveau home and the loneliness of the winter night. The movement of Henri and Arthur from the dark cold attic to the warmth of Amélie's bed while the roast is cooking is much different from Philibert's abortive trip to "Heaven", out of the dark, lightless cellar where he peels potatoes, into the bed in the cellar with Papatakos's wife, guided there by the husband. Philibert returns to his potato job hungry and sad because "when the woman was in his arms he had wept because he felt so little joy." In Is it the sun, Philibert? the gatherings in restaurants and fairs, not in homes, celebrate the unnatural. Violence for its own sake motivates the people who pay to assault the Ninth Wonder of the World, the Man with the Face of Steel, who will not hit back. Food, a major metaphor in La Guerre, is replaced by hunger in the city-world where in Philibert's room even "the water pipes rumbled like a hungry belly," while his memory of life in the village is like "the fragrance of fresh bread," and Philibert becomes "so drunk that he forgets his whole life." The joyful wake of La Guerre becomes the perverted veneration by Philibert's landlord and his wife of the skeleton of their dead child who they insist "lives."

The same themes of life and death unite the novels and their essential difference does not stem from the social realism, the dominance of the English so evident in Is it the sun, Philibert? but from the fact that in the society of the latter novel thanatos dominates. Death has become a way of life not just for those contaminated as in La Guerre by the war or the Church but for all the urban dwellers. Montreal is "like a funeral wreath placed on the ground" and Philibert's instinct for life, inherited from the village, cannot overcome the antagonist in this hostile urban environment. (pp. 46-7)

Philibert never becomes completely corrupted by this world of death, because he still has the desire to love, the eros that is man's last defense against thanatos. His last thought before his accident is of the woman whose "woman's heart would know that (he) was capable of love." Carrier reinforces this theme by ending the section immediately before the car overturns with the repetition, "Ah! To love … to love … to love…."… But in a world where no one is living no one can love….

In contrast to La Guerre, only Philibert fights the encroachment of death in his novel, and only he lives. The rest are automatons. But thanatos has triumphed not through inhibitions, poverty and fear that Philibert associates with the village, but through materialism and the technological society.

The daylight settings of the third novel are much darker than the nocturnal ones of the preceeding two. The village world of the past contained all of life including death. The sun that Carrier sees rising over the modern world is that of death, replacing the procreative and life-enhancing though often violent instincts and filling the vacuum left by the disappearance of warmth, kindness and love. Without these instincts there is no healthy struggle against death which then becomes the victor in the war that is life itself. (p. 47)