The Dialogic of Narrative: The Use of Free Indirect Discourse in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Return"

Abstract

In 1949, Elizabeth Bowen wrote a preface for a reissue of her 1923 collection of short stories, Encounters. In this preface she reviews the stories and finds that, while generally promising, they are a blend of precocity and naivety.' But she singles out for criticism one of the earliest of the stories, The Return, which she calls too-ambitious, the showy of the collection. Although she sees in the story the genuine love for the emptiness of an empty house, she feels that it lacks a satisfying donde, has a hollow kernel-a situation I must have thought up, rather than felt. Aside from the qualified praise Bowen gives to many other stories in the collection, the preface is most interesting for the forcefulness of this rejection of The Return. By the late forties, Bowen had already begun to express a desire to modify her narrative technique, especially the role she had assigned to authoritative commentary in presenting the consciousness of characters in of her mature fiction.