This is the first of four chapters that deal with the theme of impossible nostos in the context of war and its aftermath. Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier was one of the first literary responses to the Great War and to the invisible wound of shell shock. The chapter argues that West also anticipated Joyce’s Ulysses by opening a dialogue between her own generation and Homer’s Odyssey. Less explicitly than Joyce, she has appropriated key elements of Odysseus’ nostos and either rearranged or inverted them. Although the novel announces itself in its title as a story of male nostos, what immediately strikes the reader is that it is told not from the perspective of the returning soldier, or Odysseus figure, but from that of a latter-day Penelope. The chapter also argues that West’s purpose is to highlight her society’s destabilized notions of home and homecoming, and challenge the prelapsarian reading of the last summer before the war and the Ithacan images of England used to recruit fighting men and mythologize the home front.