Sequels and phobias in The Return of the Soldier of Rebecca West :: Rebecca West

Times of war and peace Sequels and phobias in The Return of the Soldier of Rebecca West.Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a prolific writer who tried every literary music genrejournalism, literary critique, the short story and the novel. Her first novel The Return ofthe Soldier published in 1918 spans half a century of creative output culminated in 1966with her last novel The Birds Fall Down. However, all her narrative is easily identifiablebecause of her unmistakable style, the structure of her novels, the topics she chooses andthe coherence of her ideas about mankind and society. Subsequently, all her novels arepsychological, historical and social documents depicting human behavior in a precisehistorical and social context. West synthesizes what she observes rooting her ideas inBritish literary tradition. Her penetrating critical eye is both penetrating and enlightening, forexample, when in The Return of the Soldier, Margaret gray-headed appears poorly dresseddaring to invade the Bal dry mansion with her mud covered boots, plot Jenny, thenarrator, expresses crude feelings of resentment towards Margaret and her social group.The latter is represented ... as the rich hate the poor, as insect things that will struggleout of the crannies which are their fitting home, and introduce ugliness to the light ofday (West, 1918, rpt.1984 32)1.Wests literary reputation was revived in the 1980s with the disintegration ofYugoslavia. Her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941)brought her wide critical attention because this novel was the last of her efforts tounderstand the pre-war situation. Furthermore, it was central to Wests next book, The center of Treason (1947), where she concentrated on the psychological characteristicsof traitors and she wondered what caused these people to do what they didfor West,war fosters deception and betrayal. The final example of Wests interest in imposture is hernovel The Birds Fall Down (1966) which concludes with the deaths of both the traitorand the friend he betrayed and in The Return of the Soldier, a study of the sequels of warin human mind, the champ is betrayed by his family. In the aforementioned novel,West employs what at the time was an original device, amnesia from war trauma orshell shock as hearty as an unusual perspective on warthat of those who waited athome. West tries to explore the reactions of three women to a returning soldier who,though married, remembers only an early love for another woman.In spite of its obvious literary quality, The Return of the Soldier proved to be anovel severely punished by critics.