Symbolism In Soldier's Home

Ernest Hemingway is often noted for his unadorned prose style, which manages nevertheless to be extremely suggestive and effective in its plainness. The short story, Soldier’s Home, is a semi-autobiographical sketch which is certainly not cloyed with metaphors and symbols. Despite this fact, Hemingway manages to contextualize his story and give it a hidden meaning, through other literary devices and narrative elements.

Essay Example on Symbolism in Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home

One of the important symbolic elements in the story is the book about war that Krebs is reading and which is one of the very few things that the former soldier finds fascinating after having come back from the front.

The denotative meaning of the symbol is obvious: Krebs is inactive after having returned home and he spends most of his time reading or playing different games. The theme of the story is obviously the impossibility of a man who has experienced war to reconnect with his family and with his own life.

There is an emphasis in the book on the permanent confusion Krebs seems to live in and on his inability to readjust to his own environment. The young former soldier is back at home, trying to find his own place in the midst of the small town’s community. Somehow however, he is still a soldier, unable to come to terms with his own experience and discomforted by the lies and exaggerations about the front, which circulate in the small community. Thus, the book about war that Krebs dwells on with such interest is symbolic for his inability to leave the war behind and continue his life as it used to be.

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He could not fully grasp the experience that he underwent and now he is desperately trying to understand it from the outside. This is even more difficult as neither the book about war nor the stories recounted by other soldiers can actually convey the sheer terror and chaos of his experience on the front. Hemingway uses the symbol of the book about war to emphasize the inability of the soldier to reconnect with his normal life and to understand its meaning.

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. In conjunction with the other elements in the story, this symbol translates the long lasting and devastating effect of war on the lives of those who have experienced it.

Works Cited: Meyer, Michael. The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. New York: Bedford, 2005