Why is returning so much harder than leaving? Why is there no appropriate term in French, as in other languages, to refer to “the one who returns” without equating him or her with a “ghost”? Drawing on the asymmetry between “leaving” and “returning”, this article explores the problematic dimension of the return in the great Western narratives, the parable of the Prodigal Son and The Odyssey in particular, and identifies the major trial of the return: recognition, forgetting, the feeling of uncanniness, the difficulty of telling the story. Can one really return home without destabilizing one’s original environment? Making detours and trips considerably alters the space of the return. As for time, it is particularly put to the test on returning: will its irreversibility, its incompressibility, the sense of its “futurition”, to use Jankélévitch’s expression, be able to resist the return?