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I looked up “idiosyncratic” in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000 and received the following definition:

idiosyncrasy

SYLLABICATION: id·i·o·syn·cra·sy
1. A structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.
2. A physiological or temperamental peculiarity.
3. An unusual individual reaction to food or a drug.

ETYMOLOGY: Greek idiosunkrsi : idio-, idio- + sunkrsis, mixture, temperament

I never knew that an idiosyncrasy was also a type of allergy. Looking up “idiosyncrasy” in the OED, it appears that the word originally referred to physical temperment, and not mental peculiarity.

Here are the thoughts I had when I read Rebecca West’s soldier book—The Return of the Soldier.

The book itself is so short that one gets the impression upon reading it that it is really some sort of baroque human instruction manual. It’s purpose, it seems, is to reveal something interesting about the human psychology and its relationship to war trauma. It does through narrative rather than non-fiction, so that the characters teach us socratically about their own internal workings. I believe The Return of the Soldier is thus a multilayer finite state machine for describing the effects of war trauma on the mind.

The first and most general mapping is between Chris as a soldier and Chris as a boy, fifteen years younger. But the edges of this mapping have subtle permutations. Does Chris transition from soldier to boy because of the war, and then back again because of the memory of his dead son? Is the common element here death? Or, another way to look at it is by an inverse relationship between love and his current state. Stuck with kitty, he returns to Margaret in his life, as a boy. Restored by her, he is then able to return to Kitty. If I am not being clear here, allow me to put forth a diagram:

As the book wears on, the number of states and edges continue. Margaret becomes a complex set of substates of her own, nurturing him, and bringing him slowly back to sanity while at the same destroying his (incorrect) worldview and hope. Then, the doctor too adds complexity to the graph, bringing the forces of medicine to bear on Chris’s boyish trance.

All in all, if this graph is computed from a close reading of the text, we will have a good idea of the point of the book, and exactly what Rebecca West wanted us to see when we read it—a portrait of the healing of a mind.

Jacob’s Room is a strange novel. By the time that you have finished reading this Virginia Woolf masterpiece, you’re left baffled and puzzled, desperately trying to grasp its significance, its meaning, or even a strong semblance of plot. You wonder why Jacob Flanders’ affectionate relationship with Clara Durrant fades away before it even really starts, or why nothing ever happens with Sandra Williams. Even the narrator wonders:

“It was not to count his notes that he took out a wad of papers and read a long flowing letter which Sandra had written … with his book before her and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark on the road to the Acropolis which … mattered forever” (192)

Something should have happened between Jacob and Sandra, but it did not, and there is no rhyme or reason why. It just did not happen, the attempt was never made. Perhaps the first line from the last chapter is the most probative:

“He left everything just as it was” (200)

Our discontent upon finishing the novel stems from this insight. All about Jacob, we’re reading a book that leaves everything just as it was. The secret of Jacob’s Room is that it meanders around Jacob without producing any result or outcome. When we start the book Jacob comes into our minds. When he commits suicide at the end of the book he leaves us. All that is left behind is a vague impression the story.

If we assume that Jacob is the main character and focus our attention on him, we only expose the frailty of the entire book. Jacob is just a transient phantom which draws our attention and wisps away. That’s why I feel lost at the end of the book—because I was following Jacob the whole way. To successfully read Jacob’s Room and extract something at all, one needs to focus on the background around Jacob Flanders.