In West’s Return of the Soldier, the experience of the war collapses the distinctions of temporality—that is, past, present, and future—into a single plan of experience for the characters of West’s novel. Chris’s shell-shock leaves him believing he is at least 15 years younger than he actually is, enamored with his childhood love Margaret rather than his wife Kitty. Jenny comes to recognize that this past Chris has entered is a protective “magic circle” made possible by Margaret, who had led “him into this quiet magic circle out of our life” that offered not only Chris protection from the recognition of what would have been his present unhappiness, but likewise serves as a salve for Jenny over her nightmares thinking about Chris in No Man’s Land. Jenny describes how Margaret’s protection of Chris via keeping him within this “magic circle” of the past has cured her own suffering related to the war: “My sleep, though short, was now dreamless. No more did I see his body rotting into union with the brown texture of corruption which is No Man’s Land, no more did I see him slipping softly down the parapet into the trench, no more did I hear voices talking in a void…” (71). Chris’s memory lapse becomes an escape and protection for them all from the present horrors of the war, and it also prevents the possibility of Chris from having to return to active duty as a soldier (71). But, paradoxically in doing so, it forecloses the possibility of their future by fragmenting their experiences into different, now conflicting, relations among each other.

The idea of the “magic circle” reminds me of Bakhtin’s idea of the Epic circle, a space and time closed off from experience and in a way thus protected from contemporary decay. The magic circle serves a similar closed-off function, becoming a space that Chris can exist within that protects him from his present and his future (and, as Jenny makes clear, also consequently protects herself by removing Chris from danger and into the safety of his illness). When the circle is broken at the conclusion of the story, Chris’s youth is once again lost as he returns to his present state of a soldier damaged by his war-time experience: “He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier’s hard tread upon the heal” (90). The irony of the novel’s final line, “He’s cured!”, points out the state of a post Great War world. Chris’s illness was not the safety of the past that protected him within this “magic circle” from the horrors he face; the real illness Chris faces, as all the characters do, is the immense emotional, spiritual, and physical destruction that has permanently impacted the world with symptoms that would persist for decades.