| Summary: | In The Return of the Soldier (1918),Rebecca West questions the predominance of conformity in a society stifled by norms, codes and class, as Chris Baldry, a soldier suffering from shell-shock, struggles to recover his memory. Focusing first on the tensions between the normal and the exception, a particular attention will be brought to the exception as a source of exclusion (looking here at the etymology of exception, ex-cipio to take out, to exclude), insofar as Chris’s wife and cousin, are ‘cut off’ (57) from his amnesiac life. This segmentarity of exception will lead me to address exception as part of a rhetoric of omission (ex-cipio: to leave out) which reveals West’s deft criticism of normative and oppressive discourses.
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