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What Is The Significance Of Krebs In Soldier's Home

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Harold Krebs, the main character of the Ernest Hemingway’s story “Soldier’s Home”, has become a shell of a man. After the war, he can’t quite find his place of belonging in the world. Nothing comforts him anymore and surely no one understands him. By not being what his parents and society expect him to be, the void between them only deepens. On the contrary, Charley Simmons is everything people want him to be. He is the desired ideal of a young man, which makes him and Krebs nothing alike. They are two fragments of the same town but very different worlds.
Hemingway depicts Krebs as a man who is stripped down from all of the beliefs and hopes that ever existed inside of him. The main culprit for it is the war. The war experience has become an …show more content…

. . he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time” (Hemingway). It is obvious that all of the things that happened to him completely drained him. Now, he is an empty person without any desires, someone who only wants to be left alone. Furthermore, one of the important contrasts between past-him and present-him is his belief in God. When talking to his mother he says that he is not “in His Kingdom” (Hemingway) which is contrary to him attending a religious college before the war. He completely lost a sense of it, of all the religious values he once had. Also, his numbness emerges onto the surface when he says to his mother that he doesn’t love her. He simply came back from the war as a different man who “did not want any consequences ever again” (Hemingway). Being quite the opposite, Charley Simmons “has a

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