Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

I don't know why but the colors were not working well for me and were previewing as white text & white highlights, so I apologize for the grey & white. The Return of the Soldier might be one of my favorite texts so far this semester. I wish I could talk about everything I loved. Jenny takes us through her intellectual and spiritual journey and teaches us about love, happiness, human suffering, and sacrifice in her observations of Chris and Margaret, which  the reader transcends to the context of World War I itself. Although we are presented with fragments of sentences, disruptions of memory, dream world versus storyworld, and past versus present, I found the story as-told-by Jenny to be linear and goal oriented as she takes us through her own recollection of the sequence of her discoveries, participating in West's representation of the catastrophes of World War I from a domestic space.

At each critical point in Jenny’s recollection she cultivates another step in her discovery. Upon meeting Mrs. Grey, Jenny highlights the difference social status, which will be imperative to Jenny’s “reading” of Chris and Margaret later in the narrative. The first time Jenny sees Chris in his shell-shock state, she establishes the motif of darkness and how Chris is separated from Jenny and Kitty by this darkness, “He watched her retreat into the shadows, as though she were a symbol of this new life by which he was baffled and oppressed” (24). This motif is cultivated further in Chapter 3 when the reader is almost taken out of Jenny’s recollection of her world of darkness and placed for a moment in Chris and Margaret’s world. Although the chapter seems to move through time, to the past, the more important aspect to me is that Jenny the narrator is looking back at her reception of Chris’s memories, so that the reader, and Jenny (as narrator), are in the present during the whole chapter. The storyworld Jenny is occasionally lost inside her vision of Chris and Margaret’s world, “There were only two real people in the world, Chris and this woman . . . and I was absorbed in a mental vision of them” (46-7), but remains largely as one of the necessary, “unconscious deliberate” (71) participants like Margaret, Kitty, and Chris who make things work the way they do in her world, however heartbreaking.