The Haunted Soldier in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

Abstract

This research concentrates on studying the psychological illness of Christopher Baldry, the hero of Rebecca West's war novel The Return of the Soldier. West presents a young man who experienced the horror of the First world War as a soldier; he has been haunted by the dreadful scenes he has seen at the Front. Thus, he returns home suffering shell shock that causes his amnesia; this negatively affects his masculinity and also his relationship with his family, especially his wife. The study shows that West depends mainly on her rich Freudian Knowledge, her vivid reading of Myers's study and the war poems of Siegfried Sassoon in portraying the calamity of her hero, his psychology that has been severely injured, the misery he has confronted in the life of trenches and his masculinity that has been painfully broken. The images that have been used to depict Christopher's fear, anxiety, vulnerability and his nostalgia for the peaceful past show to what extent West had been aware of the suffering of the young soldiers at the frontline, suffering that had been conveyed to the home front by the patients of Charles S. Myers, and by Siegfried Sassoon, the young poet who himself joined the war as a soldier and experienced the bitter reality of the war, a reality that makes West's hero being haunted.