For those who chose the prose on the higher level English exam...

Back (1946)

Certainly Ernest Hemingway is America's great writer about the effects
of war on soldiers. In Back, though, Green has rendered a postwar
existence as shattered as The Sun Also Rises or "A Way You'll Never
Be." The action of the novel deals with the return home of Charley
Summers, who has lost a leg and his psychological stability in the war;
his inability to adjust to the changes in his world constitute the series of
crises in the work. The biggest external change is the death of his lover,
Rose, whose name breeds a riot of wordplay and uncontrolled imagery,
to which we will return shortly.

The loss is complicated by two factors: Rose was married to James
Philips, with whom she had a son, Ridley; and she had an illegitimate
half-sister and double, Nancy Whitmore, of whom neither she nor
Charley was aware at the time of her death. Charley's delicate mental
state is threatened first by the id�e fixe that Ridley is his son (he is not)
and, after he meets her, that Nancy is in fact Rose.

The challenges confronting Charley, aside from being a returning
amputee, include socializing with James and his in-laws, the Grants, in
order to determine the true parentage of Ridley, adjusting to civilian life,
office work, and possible romance, and exorcizing Rose's hold on his
memory, particularly after her ghostly reappearance as Nancy.

The progress of the plot, from Charley's initial stumbling through the
graveyard looking for Rose's headstone, through various complications
and crises into which his confusion leads him, to the final scene in which
Nancy, whom he finally knows in her own person, proposes marriage to
him, might seem the stuff of comedy. Indeed, it has its moments of humor.
Charley's experiences, however, are so fraught with pain and anguish,
his psychological disintegration so unsettling, that the novel is closer to
tragedy than comedy. His disability, like John Haye's blindness or Mr.
Rock's deafness in Concluding, acts as a metaphor for his alienation
(Weatherhead 95). The loss of the leg is merely the most prominent of
numerous losses: many people have lost Rose; Mrs. Grant has lost all
memory of Rose and believes Charley is her brother John, lost in World
War I; Charley loses Dot Pitter, his assistant and would-be love interest,
to James; Dot loses her job; Nancy is threatened with the loss of her
home; Nancy and Mrs. Grant lose Mr. Grant to a stroke. Suffering
becomes the main mode of experience in the novel.

Green's stylistic challenge in this novel is to render Charley's frayed
mental state effectively, without making a narrative too chaotic to
follow. He employs several devices and techniques to achieve his
desired effect. One is the use of hermetic dialogues, in which neither
participant can convey meaning to the other, as when Charley and Mr.
Grant share a moment of noncommunication over sending Charley to see
Nancy, whom he still takes to be Rose. Charley asks the older man "why
did you send me?"

"To be a bit of company for her, of course," Mr. Grant said, as
though it was the most natural thing in the world. "She's living alone
now. She had her husband killed out in Egypt, and changed her
name back. She's a plucky little thing," he said. "Because what you
have to remember, Charley boy, is that you're one of the lucky ones.
You're back. I know I reminded myself of that, come the finish of
the last war, when I couldn't seem to understand at certain times,
just after I got out of France. You see I trusted you. It's not everyone
I'd give her address. And I trust you still, if I may have been
mistaken in one respect. Don't you younger fellows ever think of
others? There's that little lady been alone now for close on two
months, ever since the fly-bombs got so bad. Of course I thought of
you."

"When did she marry, then" Charley managed to ask.

"While you were in Germany," Mr. Grant answered, bright. "That's
all the life they had together. In nineteen forty three it was. They had
three leaves, then he was gone. And once he was killed it seemed to
turn her bitter towards me. Life is like that sometimes."

A bigamist, Charley thought. Would this awful thing never stop?
His jealousy got hold of him again. (90)

Charley's delusion leads him to hear meanings that simply are not
present. If Nancy were Rose, then she would be a bigamist, her father a
procurer, Jim Phillips a willing cuckold, and Mrs. Grant mad with no
reason. None of this makes sense to an objective observer, but Charley
is far from objective; rather, he is lost in subjectivity and obsession. He
misses the most important clue, that Nancy has changed her name back to
Whitmore, not to Grant. Subsequently, when he asserts that Mr. Grant is
Nancy's (Rose's) father, the elder man flies into a rage, believing that a
confidence has been betrayed. Never does either man explain his
premise. If Charley were to ask why Rose is hiding out as another
woman, away from her husband and child, all would become clear, but
in his delusion he assumes that her identity is a given and that a
conspiracy has been mounted against him.

Most of Charley's conversations run along these lines, with some very
basic misapprehension driving the confusion forward. His talks with
Nancy are generally disastrous, his fainting when first seeing her being
the model for their relationship. Again and again he asks her
unanswerable questions and makes wild accusations that would be fair
only if she were Rose. He and Arthur Middlewitch can never
communicate, despite their common experience of being wounded
soldiers, because each is too lost in his own self-interest. And of course,
any communication with Mrs. Grant is impossible, because her delusions
about Charley run as deep as his about Rose.

Another technique is the ubiquitous, self-tormenting punning on the name
Rose. In Caught the rose makes a significant appearance as an image,
and there is one particular memory of a scene in a rose garden that
Michael North takes as an adumbration of this novel, both in terms of its
presentation of the fragmented psyche of a war-tossed hero and the
emphasis on roses (North 123). Nothing in Green's fiction, howevernot
the sight and blindness images in Blindness, not the fog and birds in
Party Going, nothingcan match the relentless onslaught of rose images
and puns in Back. When we first see him, in the graveyard while trying
to find Rose's grave, Charley is driven to distraction by the sheer
profusion of roses. And mention of rose or roses guarantees his loss of
the thread of the conversation as his mind pulls back to his dead lover.
He sees roses everywhere, thinks of them, sees not pink but rose, even,
as Weatherhead notes, mistakes the past tense of rise for his paramour
and the verb grant for her father (Weatherhead 99). A great deal of this
punning is at the level of character; that is, Charley either generates it or
hears and misconstrues it into a reference, usually out of context, to the
object of his obsession. Just enough of it, however, appears in the
narrative itself to have an unsettling effect on readers, allowing readers
to share in the nightmarish, overwhelming sense of conspiracy that
Charley feels around him.

A related device is the use of repetition in Charley's thoughts and
actions: he keeps asking the same questions, experiencing the same
moments, thinking the same thoughts. Just as his belief in his mistaken
assumptions persists, so do the accusations, the suspicions, the outcries,
even his denials (like Peter, he denies Rose three times). The net effect
of the repetitions is to underscore just how far from reality Charley is,
that despite a host of evidence to the contrary, he remains stuck in his
delusions for a very long time.