Soldier's Home By Ernest Hemingway Analysis

Krebs “felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities.” Krebs own family lacks support for his yearning to talk to someone about what he has done and gone through. “She [Krebs’ mother] often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her attention always wandered. His father was non-committal.” It is obvious why Krebs decided to sleep all day and lock himself in his room, his town and his family have locked him in there with nothing but his thoughts. Krebs cannot leave the room because he is unable to let out all that he carries from the war.

Upon returning home the soldiers meet a field of new troubles that come with acclimation to society after fighting. Many soldiers come home with skills that are not applicable to their lives and generally a much deeper understanding of what they believe the world consists of. This leads to much disillusion with the world they come back to. In both Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien’s stories, soldiers meet with disillusionment and disconnect from society. The soldiers react in different ways to this feeling; the authors use diction, sentence structure, and figurative language to demonstrate their troubles with acclimation.

Hemingway has made use of the book as a symbol of war to stress the soldier’s inability to lead a normal life (McKenna and Raabe 210). The symbol is used in the context of many other elements that convey Krebs’ distance from his own life. The book about war is a literary symbol that Hemingway employs in a specific context.

The summer of 1919 is a difficult time for Krebs to accept because although the town has moved on from the war, he wishes to hold on to what he believes, is still the present. Hemingway uses the setting to bring the reader a clear understanding that war was a strong impact on soldiers who had been participants of it. The setting reveals the big picture; nothing is over until’ you let it go. Hemingway portrays the soldier’s hometown to be very similar to the war, in the perspective that his hometown is very confusing, complicated, and restless. The title “A Soldier’s Home” brings irony to the setting in the sense that

A “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemmingway is an intriguing story about a man by the name of Krebs who enlists in the Marine Corps during his attendance at a Methodist college in Kansas. After serving for two years at the Rhine, he returned with the second division in 1919 but Krebs wasn’t in the same state of mind as before he left. The reason why Krebs was so distraught when he returned home was not because of the fact that no one wanted to listen to his war stories but because him and other soldiers were without any real benefits such as medical, education, extra remuneration, or anything to help him get back into the real world. This reason stated is the reason that Krebs and soldiers alike came home from war with nothing to show for

Even his mother, despite her wanting him to talk about the war by asking questions, never really pays attention. As a result he resorts to lying about his experience, forcing Krebs to isolate himself and oppose discussing what he had needed to discuss and get off his chest.

He needed to be heard by the others in his town, but “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities” (Hemingway 133) that they did not want to listen to Krebs stories. The community did not care what Krebs was thinking in his mind, or how he was feeling. Krebs had no choice but to tell small lies about the war because the community could not capture what actually happened during the war. Krebs stories would have too much information that the people were unprepared to listen or know about. Perhaps he did not want to discuss the war with others because he felt guilty of all the massacres he has witness in the

This had to of put a genuine strain on his relationship with his relatives, who in Krebs mind, clearly lived in a parallel universe.

Soldier’s Home is a story about the experiences of a soldier returning from war. The narrative starts with a description of an image or photograph of Harold Krebs. Krebs is the main character of this story. He was a young man who was attending the Methodist College in Kansas before he had to enlist in the Marines to find in the war (Hemingway 111-116). The opening picture is an increasingly significant source of contrast between the young man who went to war and the one who comes back who has become silent and alienated after coming home. Krebs comes back in 1919 even though the war ended in 1918. His return is not marked by celebrations and parades that were often given to the young soldiers who had managed to come home early. Rather, Krebs finds out that the people are not overly excited about his news of the war unless he lies and exaggerates about his role during the war (Hemingway 111-116).

Hemingway begins by saying Krebs went to a Methodist college fraternity where they wore, “exactly the same height and style collar,” (272) indicating that they were neatly dressed and proper. This is an indication that Krebs came from an environment that required uniformity. In the next paragraph, Hemingway also describes how Krebs is seen in a picture near the Rhine river soon after his enrollment where, “Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms,” and, “The Rhine does not show in the picture,” (272) which leads the reader to believe that there is no solid proof that Krebs was ever in Germany during the war.

In the story, “Soldier’s Home” it is told from the third person narrator point of view. Hemingway, having been a former journalist is able to show how distant Krebs is because of being the type of journalist who is detached just like Krebs was detached by his experience in World War I. As Hemingway writes he shows how Krebs holds his emotions in that he knows his mother will not understand. When Krebs calls his mom “Mummy” he is trying to comfort her by acting like a child. At the end Krebs makes a decision to leave and go to Kansas City because he feels he may not ever reconnect with his family.

The new desire for an uncomplicated life also stops him from developing a relationship with the opposite sex. Instead of pursuing females, he admires the “pattern” of their clothing from their “round Dutch collars” to their “silk stocking”. Krebs’ view of females is that they live “in such a complicated world” full of relationship issues. These issues keep him away because he does not want “any consequences” from the complications of a female. Krebs sees the girls as a “nice pattern. He liked the pattern”, but he cannot break into their pattern because it would deal with emotions. He believes that breaking the emotional pattern would not be worth the results.

He was highly interested in the book even though he had just come from an actually war. “He looked forward with a good feeling to reading all the really good histories when they would come out with good detail maps. Now he was really learning about the war” (3). This shows that Krebs is still in touch with his war life and he even wished to stayed in Germany rather than coming home. “On the whole he had liked Germany better. He did not want to leave Germany. He did not want to come home. Still, he had come home. He sat on the front porch” (3).

To begin with, since the beginning of the short story the reader is able to note that Krebs is a soldier who is severely impacted by the war. Short sentences allow Hemingway to demonstrate the isolation that Krebs feels once he returns home. This use of abrupt sentence structure not only shows Krebs detachment, but it also signals to the reader that fighting in the war has emotionally deteriorated Krebs. To clarify the reason for Krebs behavior, the narrator mentions, “By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late” (Bedford 116). This not only gives background information on Krebs but it reveals to the reader that Krebs did not receive the welcome he expects. He returns home with the hopes of feeling like he belongs, but he is incapable of establishing connections or even feeling

Although it provides an important perspective into the lives of post war veterans, Hemingway’s novel is merely a fictional story and the events that occur in the book are not representative of any real life occurrences. Hemingway is able to accurately able to depict the shift of morale views that occurred after the war.  People went from emotional and restrained and god fearing, to liberated, materialistic, and pessimistic. Following the First World War, Veterans lost a belief in objective morality and correspondingly lost the belief in love and capacity to make deep connections with people. The characters within this novel face social and personal problems, whether it be physical ailments or mental disabilities, both of which impede their lives completely. Hemingway’s ability to capture and and present the overwhelming emotions that encompassed the Lost Generation is what makes his novel effective and historically