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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.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 at 8:15 pm and is tagged with finite state machine, war trauma, rebecca west, human psychology, common element, inverse relationship, effects of war, wests, number of states, permutations, worldview, fifteen years, current state, sanity, non fiction, kitty, return of the soldier, narrative, graph, complexity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

One Response to 'The Return of the Soldier: State Machine'

1. 
   Mcgill said:

   on November 4th, 2005 at 10:59 pm

   The book also mentions the opposite relation between war trauma and love. I think the diagram above explains my point.

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