Second World War

World War II is a historical marker rather than a narrated event in the supplied passages. Its references place the characters’ memories on a broad timeline and contrast Eleanor Ouellette’s old-world aura with the True Knot’s long history and vulnerability to death.

References in the Narrative

In Dan Torrance’s impression, Eleanor Ouellette’s hoarse, rhythmic voice evokes a cabaret singer who had already seen and done everything before the German army entered Paris in the spring of 1940. The comparison gives her a sense of age and worldly experience; the passage also notes that she had looked gravely ill since moving into Room 15 of Rivington One in 2009.

A separate recollection places the deaths of some True Knot members in the years after World War II ended. Rose the Hat remembers Hands-Off Hans dying in an Arkansas windstorm when a falling power line electrocuted him, alongside other members whose deaths she had treated as rare exceptions.

Narrative Significance

The war provides a chronological measure for memories that reach beyond the immediate action: 1940 anchors the image associated with Eleanor’s voice, while the postwar reference locates earlier losses within the True Knot’s extended past. Neither passage recounts the war itself. Instead, these allusions use its historical span to suggest how long-lived experience can shape a character’s presence—and, in the True Knot’s case, how a belief in near-immortality can be unsettled by remembered deaths.