A Guest + A Host = A Ghost. Dramas of Hospitality in Rebecca West's "The Return of the Soldier"

Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier (1918) focuses on a common trope in Great War Literature: the traumas of war and the difficulties of returning veterans to fit back in with everyday life. The story of the shell-shocked soldier Chris Baldry, who suddenly finds himself in a world which has aged 15 years beyond his memory, may be read as the unfolding of a multi-layered drama of hospitality: Chris’s memory erasure does not only turn him into a foreigner who does not recognize his wife or remember his dead son, but also forces his family members to question the role they have been playing in his life. An analysis of the novel’s modernist techniques and stylistic features introduces a redefinition of the concept of hospitality in relation to trauma and disease. The Return of the Soldier may be read not only as a critique of war, but also as a multi-perspective narrative on the precariousness of host-guest relationships. The “question-of-the-foreigner” (Derrida, 2000) acquires new meanings when disease transforms a loved one into an “other” with whom communication seems to be interrupted. Hospitality may thus be regarded as an unstable concept, in which identity and alterity are constantly renegotiated.