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. But here at home it was all too complicated. He knew he could never get through it all again."
             Here is a significant ambiguity: "it all" may well connote the whole process of being and ceasing to be a lover, and "again" suggests that Krebs has been through this process before. Descriptions of Krebs' lack of involvement with the local girls occupy one fourth of the story. These descriptions converge around the word 'complicated', repeated four times in this context. The girls live in "a complicated world"; "They were too complicated"; "it [to talk to a girl] is too complicated"; and "He had tried so hard to keep his life from being complicated". The latter quotation suggests that the most difficult problem is not the complicated realm of the girls, but Krebs' fear of the complexity that might result from any approach he might make. Once he talks to a girl, he must get through a complicated sexual encounter. Conversations, for Krebs, make the male/female sexual relationship complicated. His aversion to such
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