The article discusses Alejandro Zambra’s novel Formas de volver a casa (2011) in the context of the aesthetic idea of Bildung [education]. The author’s narratives of the past are thereby understood as an aesthetic-literary educational experience. The broader framework of this study is, therefore, as follows: while the Bildungsroman consistently features a protagonist who works on his education with regards to the future, Zambra’s retrospective mode of narration creates a protagonist who undergoes a developmental process from a position of failure and by means of retrospection. I address whether the author thereby succeeds in constructing a Bildung narrative that does not begin with a view to a promising future but rather in relation to a reinterpretation of the past. The framework for the concept of Bildung is borrowed from Friedrich Schiller, while the critical view of Bildung as idyll comes from Heinrich von Kleist.