'Soldier's Home': Of Broken Hearts and Souls - Ernest Hemingway
Literary Analysis of Ernest Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home''Soldier's Home': Of Broken Hearts and SoulsIn the works of Ernest Hemingway, that which is excluded is often as significant as that which is included; a hint is often as important and thought-provoking as an explicit statement. This is why one must read and reread him to enjoy the true flavor of his writing. 'Soldier's Home' is a prime example of this art of echo and indirection. Harold Krebs, the protagonist of 'Soldier's Home', is a young veteran portrayed as suffering from an inability to readjust to society - Krebs suffers from returning to the familial, social, and religious "home". Moreover, the story is also about a conflicted mother-son relationship. Krebs' small-town mother cannot comprehend her son's struggles and sufferings caused by the war. She devotes herself to her religion and never questions her own values; she manipulates her son. She is one of the Hemingway 'overbearing mothers' who also appear in 'The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife' and 'Now I Lay Me'. Her sermons to her son lack any power to heal his spiritual wounds. She has determined that Krebs should live in God's "Kingdom," find a job, and get married like the other local boys. The husband
His aversion to such relationships, we are to infer, derives from previous experiences with women that have perhaps reinforced his observations of his parents' marriage. Because the American soldiers do not have to talk, and because the German girls are probably prostitutes, relationships between them are uncomplicated. These descriptions converge around the word 'complicated', repeated four times in this context. However, Krebs makes an exception for his young sister Helen. Krebs simply accepts her invitation, and goes to the schoolyard to see her pitch, as proof of their mutual love. But here, in "Soldier's Home," there is no hint of incest. Krebs' noncommittal father is obviously dominated by his wife; she makes the decisions. Krebs' indifference towards the girls in the town seems to reflect his disillusionment not only with the war and his parents' marriage, but also with another experience - Krebs' breaking up with a lover: "Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. a distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. " The repetition of "consequences" sounds too portentous for the previous problem to have been a merely casual love affair. "Ironically, Hemingway uses the terms "alliances" and "feuds," words better suited to conflicts between nations and families, to describe the girls' complicated world. Just as he emphasizes the German girls' lack of beauty, Hemingway also erases the Rhine to show the lack of romance in such relationships. lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost to themselves. This story however, also is a reflection on Hemingway himself as it is thought that he too went through similar circumstances and repercussions after his tour of duty during World War I. It is deeply ironic that the same idealism and patriotism that sent Kreb's to war as a college student - he was not drafted but enlisted in the marines - now disgusts him: ".
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Acceptance Essays
