Soldiers Home Short Story

Soldier’s Home By Ernest Hemingway In the battlefield soldiers are experiencing war, death, loss – they kill and watch fellow soldiers getting killed. Being a soldier is in no way an easy life, and it is hard for people, who have not experienced war to understand. When these soldiers returns from war they need to adjust themselves to their old lives – adjust themselves to live in a place that has not change a tiny bit, even though they are in no way the same person as they were when they left.

The main character in Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s home” experiences the conflicts connected with returning from war.

What strikes me the most when reading Ernest Hemingway is his style of writing. This short story is characteristic due to the few adjectives, adverbs and Hemingway does not tell us about the characters’ feelings and thoughts and one must interpret these from actions and conversations. His style is simple, direct and his grammar is almost grade school-like.

When first reading the short story one might find the short story in lack of substance due to the missing direct statements and descriptions of emotions. The reader needs to be active to understand Hemingway’s stories.

Harold Krebs went to take part in World War 1 immediately after finishing college. Although World War 1 ended in 1918 Krebs did not return to his hometown before 1919. After his arrival he is not greeted as a war hero like his fellow students. The hysteria was rampant in the area, but at the time he arrives the hysteria has passed.

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People find it difficult to understand why he returned as late as he did ( people seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over. ” (ll. 8-9)).

Soldiers Home Ernest Hemingway

It seems as though Krebs has returned so late, because he has a hard time interacting with “ordinary people” – people who has not experienced the war as he has. At first he does not want to talk about his experiences in the war, but when he feels the need to do it, people do not listen. Due to his desire to talk about it he starts lying to make his stories more interesting. I believe talking is an important part of the “healing process” when someone has experienced war – Krebs does not like talking to people due to the fact that they do not understand him.

He would like to have a girlfriend, but the talking makes him change his mind, “now he would have liked a girl if she had some to him and not wanted to talk,” (l. 40). His mother pressurizes Krebs to find a girlfriend and she calls attention to the fact that the boys from his old school has settled down and “on their way to being really a credit to the community” (ll. 85-86). To Krebs this is a “hard slap in the face” – a veiled critic. The mother is very religious and she does not believe that going to war is the solution to anything – she does instead believe that a good job, a nice wife and children are the real “credit to the community”.

Furthermore, the mother does not understand that Krebs is no longer like the boys he used to hang out with – he has seen death and death changes people. Death has made him incapable of loving – something we are shown when the mother asks him “don’t you love your mother, dear boy? ” (l. 97) and Krebs truthfully answers “no”. It was not his intention to hurt his mother, and he ends up promising her that he in fact loves her. This is yet another lie, and he realises that he has to move on. Krebs was once religious (“… from a Methodist college in Kansas,” (l. 1)) but he has now lost his faith to God and he is no longer “in His Kingdom” (l. 4). His faith in religion has faltered due to his experiences in the war. Although he wants to break with the family’s religious values, but he cannot break with the authority he still feels religion is. Krebs feels sorry for his mother because she (and her religion) has made him lie – and made him feel guilty as well (“He had felt sorry for his mother she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it…” (ll. 23-24)). I believe that isolation from society is an important theme in this short story due to the fact that it has such an impact on the main character.

During the war Krebs felt important and useful but now no one even wants to listen to his story unless he lies. He has turned into a passive observer – he observes the girls walking by, but he does not want to interact with them – he just sits on the porch reading. Hemingway wanted the reader to believe that his short stories’ and novels’ reflected himself as person. In Soldier’s Home it is obvious that Krebs does not like his mother – Hemingway did as well detest his mother. Hemingway was raised in a very religious way but as he grew older he became more rebellious and wanted to break with his former religious believes, just like Krebs.