Bend Back

While reading Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris I was enthralled by her use of imagery and word choice. Something I looked over was how often Bowen references to time; past, present, and future. In Marian Kelly’s article The Power of the Past: Structural Nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The House in Paris’ and ‘The Little Girls’ she draws such word choice to my attention, along with the overall plot structure of the novel.

Kelly expresses that the past section of the novel creates holes in the narrative (Kelly 3), however by Bowen structuring the novel with these holes, she adds to the narrative as a whole. “Bowen leaves it up to her readers to reorient themselves, and in doing so they face the same task as the protagonists: to come to an understanding of the past that will allow them to bend their minds back to the present.” (Kelly 3). Bowen gives the reader an experience. The reader has to pause and think about the changes in time and what it means, and once the book is done she is forced to question everything.

The narrator is not reliable and Bowen does this intentionally. She calls for the reader to reflect, like the characters in the novel reflect. Bowen plays with identity and sense of self in the novel. Kelly describes Bowen's plot structure as the “nostalgic return” (Kelly 2), due to her having the past in between the two present sections. Our identities are rooted in the past, present, and future. Leopold feels as though he will not know who he is until he understands his past, for example. The past is at the center of the novel, thus nostalgia is the core of it. In the first present section, the characters speak of the past and the reader develops questions. During the past section, the reader hopes those questions will be answered, however, more questions are formed.

In The House in Paris Bowen uses the “bend back” plot structure as a metaphor, to give the reader an experience, and to add to the meaning of the novel as a whole. At the end of the novel, there are many questions left unanswered, and this is intentional. Like the characters of the novel, we do not know or understand everything, and we never will.