Within the first paragraph Hemingway establishes his main character Krebs as all American boy with religious values by writing, "Krebs went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas" (152; all page references are from the same text, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 6th Ed.). This one sentence alone gives me an image quite distinct in me head setting the main character up for the point of the story, his return home from war. Krebs before the war seemed to me to be quite joyous with his present surroundings, such as his college buddies, "There is a picture which shows him amongst his fraternity brothers all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar" (152). His character is that of a sense of belonging, involvement in activities that were of some importance to him, then however he enlisted in the marines and went to World War I. There is a significant sentence in the first paragraph, in which Hemingway says, ". . . and did not return to the United States until the second division returned from the Rhine in the summer of 1919" (152). So Krebs was late coming back from the war, which does not help his homecoming in the least, in fact it just makes it plain old worse. The short story by Hemingway, "A Soldier's Home" is a story that deals with major transitions in a regular all American kid's life after he returns home from world war I, one being how Hemingway shows just within the first page how difficult life can be returning late from a war that brought so much pain.
             Since Krebs was late returning home from the war, and the rest of the hometown heroes had made their celebrated homecomings, it was then that Krebs received no celebrated return whatsoever. Hemingway establishes that by writing, "People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the wars was over" (153). Hemingway to me is expressing how ...