Paola Valencia
Professor Nanda
English 102
13 February 2013
Literary Analysis of “Soldier’s Home”
Inspired by his days of service in the Ambulance Corps during the First World War, Hemingway utilizes his experience to tell the story of a soldier’s struggle to get back home both physically and mentally in his short story “Soldier’s Home”. Hemingway captivates his readers in a tale of a soldier’s (Harold Krebs) late return home from World War I. Upon his return, Krebs discovers that the life he once knew changed. In fact, his life had changed so drastically that upon his return, Krebs’ life no longer fit in its former place. Ernest Hemingway is often noted for writing stories that seem flat and lifeless but his unadorned prose style nevertheless manages to be extremely suggestive and effective in its plainness. Hemingway manages to give depth to his writing and give it hidden meaning. Hemingway gives his readers the responsibility of interpreting and making a personal connection through a gloomy tone and ironic setting to the story as they get farther and farther into Krebs' world of despair and the emotions that he is struggling with; allowing readers to go on a more personal journey along with Krebs in discovering his new post war society and the role that he plays in it.
The title itself exemplifies Hemingway talents in giving depth and suggestive symbolism to plain text. The title “Soldier’s Home” implies a hint of foreshadowing to the story. Rather than sounding like a statement to assure the reader that the soldier is happy to be home, Hemingway’s title suggests more of a question: where is this soldier’s home? Did he ever make it home? Does he even have a home to come back to? The title of this short story also sets up t...
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...uth about it. Krebs feel nauseas and uncomfortable when lying about his experience. Bound by lies, Krebs forgets his brave and heroic deeds at war. That is the reason Krebs develops a bitter sense towards the war and distaste for everything that has happened to him.
By placing his character Krebs back at home after the war, Hemingway is able to set up the post war tone of despair and nostalgia to shows Krebs’ unhappiness of being home from war and difficulty adjusting to society. Krebs is caught somewhere in the mix of his former life, his life in the military, and his new life at home. The “Soldier's Home” illustrates the misfortune and struggles that of a soldier return home. Hemingway gives his readers the tools in order to interpret the story and make it a more personal connection. He captivates his audience as they are somehow able to relate to this tragedy.
In “Soldier’s Home,” the main character Krebs exhibits grief, loneliness. When he returns home with the second group of soldiers he is denied a hero's return. From here he spends time recounting false tales of his war times. Moving on, in the second page of the story he expresses want but what he reasons for not courting a female. A little while after he is given permission to use the car. About this time Krebs has an emotional exchange with both his little sister and his mother. Revealing that “he feels alienated from both the town and his parents , thinking that he had felt more ‘at home’ in Germany or France than he does now in his parent’s house”(Werlock). Next, the story ends with his mother praying for him and he still not being touched. Afterwards planning to move to Kansas city to find a job. Now, “The importance of understanding what Krebs had gone through in the two years before the story begins cannot be overstated. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been for the young man”(Oliver). Near the start of the story the author writes of the five major battles he “had been at”(Hemingway) in World War I- Bellaue Wood, Soissons, Champagne, St.Mihiel, and Argonne. The importance of these are shown sentences later that the
The first area of symbolism in “Soldier’s Home” is Krebs false war stories. Krebs false war stories represents his need to cope with the realities of war. Krebs
When people think of the military, they often think about the time they spend over in another country, hoping they make it back alive. No one has ever considered the possibility that they may have died inside. Soldiers are reborn through war, often seeing through the eyes of someone else. In “Soldier’s home” by Ernest Hemingway, the author illustrates how a person who has been through war can change dramatically if enough time has passed. This story tells of a man named Harold (nick name: Krebs) who joined the marines and has finally come back after two years. Krebs is a lost man who feels it’s too complicated to adjust to the normal way of living and is pressured by his parents.
The main point of “Vagueness and ambiguity in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” two puzzling passages” is to describe what made Ernest Hemingway’s character Krebs such a mysterious dynamic character and how was his influences impacted on who he is. Milton Cohen describes how Hemingway use the “iceberg technique” to enhance readers to figure out the missing idea on what’s being interpreted in Krebs mind. At the beginning of the article Cohen use the word “vagueness” which means to not have a clear sight or any other senses that is recognizable in an indefinite way (Cohen 159). Statements that Cohen have noted about Hemingway’s story being too vague included the two passages that exaggerating his war stories towards others and the idea for Krebs to
One observation that can be made on Hemingway’s narrative technique as shown in his short stories is his clipped, spare style, which aims to produce a sense of objectivity through highly selected details. Hemingway refuses to romanticize his characters. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of s...
Hemingway, Ernest. "Soldier's Home." The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 6th Edition. Ed. Michael Meyer. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2002. 152-57.
The adjustment from years on the frontlines of World War I to the mundane everyday life of a small Oklahoma town can be difficult. Ernest Hemingway’s character Harold Krebs, has a harder time adjusting to home life than most soldiers that had returned home. Krebs returned years after the war was over and was expected to conform back into societies expectations with little time to adapt back to a life not surrounded by war. Women take a prominent role in Krebs’s life and have strong influences on him. In the short story “Soldier’s Home” Hemingway uses the women Krebs interacts with to show Krebs internal struggle of attraction and repulsion to conformity.
The story has different elements that make it a story, that make it whole. Setting is one of those elements. The book defines setting as “the context in which the action of the story occurs” (131). After reading “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemmingway, setting played a very important part to this story. A different setting could possibly change the outcome or the mood of the story and here are some reasons why.
As a famous author Ernest Hemingway has been credited for the creation of multiple critically acclaimed books. One in particular, A Farewell to Arms, while having received its fair share of approval, has also received multiple threats throughout the years to be banned by certain organizations and school systems. As respectful as I am on these groups’ opinions, I myself cannot help but disagree with their statements and viewpoints. In my point of view the book should not be banned because while it may contain some undesirable components, it is overall a moderate work of literature that has a deep foresight into heartfelt issues such as war, life, and love.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His mother, Grace Hall, was a trained opera singer and later on, a music teacher. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a doctor and an avid naturalist ("Ernest Hemingway: An Inventory”). Just after graduating high school, at the age of eighteen, Hemingway enlisted in the army to fight in World War I ("The Big Read"). After being severely wounded in the war, he moved to Paris in 1921, and devoted himself to writing fiction (Baker). It is said that, “No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway” (Putnam). Hemingway’s book A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929, and was based off of the events that happened to him in the war and what happened in his love life. Fredrick Henry, the protagonist, is an American ambulance driver fighting for the allies during World War I. He is introduced to a nurse named Catherine, who he later on falls in love with. Henry was hit by a trench mortar shell and was very badly injured. He is then sent to Milan, where Catherine later on comes to help nurse him to health. The two fall in love and Henry no longer is involved with the war, so they try and have a child, but both Catherine and the child die during labor, and Henry is left alone. Psychoanalytical approach views the psychological motivations of characters, which refer to the dynamics of personality development and behavior based on the unconscious motivations of a person ("Psychoanalytic Theory”). Hemingway’s writing was greatly impacted by his real life tragedies, which consist of witnessing the gruesomeness of war and his discovery and loss of love, this helps exhibi...
...egular job or move out" (Waldhorn 9). Both Hemingway and Krebs moved out and got jobs. Beyond a doubt, Hemingway wrote from his past experiences. In "Indian Camp," Hemingway used his own relationship with his father to breathe life into the fictional characters of Nick and his father. By leaving his childhood and entering the war, Hemingway recalled his own accounts of injuries and love that made up the character Henry and Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. And finally, with his return home after the war, Hemingway uses Krebs in "Soldier's Home" to express his distaste for the home life.
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
“Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway is about a Methodist College student that goes to war from Kansas. When Krebs comes back from war, he starts a life of lying and deceit that he finds difficult to escape. Krebs continues lying about the past and his present in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” Hemingway conveys Krebs’ inability to embrace the truth of the past and the present through plot in the exposition, conflict, and climax.
The short story “In Another Country” by Earnest Hemingway is a story about the negative effects of war. The story follows an unnamed American officer and his dealings with three other officers, all of whom are wounded in World War I and are recuperating in Milan, Italy. In war, much can be gained such as freedom and peace, however war also causes a plethora of negative consequences. Cultural alienation, loss of physical and emotional identity, and the irony of war technology and uncertainty of life are all serious consequences of war that are clearly shown by Hemingway.
middle of paper ... ... so provided the reader with realistic descriptions of the warfront. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms realistically explores the inglorious and brutal truths of war, and idealistically analyzes the power of true love. Works Cited “A Farewell to Arms Essay – A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.”