Ernest Hemingway Soldier's Home

Thesis: Ernest Hemingway depicts the disillusionment that many felt post World War I in his short stories, “In Another Country” and “Soldier’s Home”.

Hemingway’s story, “In Another Country”, showcases a soldier accompanied by other soldiers, who had all been wounded in the war. The narrator is an American and the other men are Italian. He does not fit in for a multitude of reasons, but the first reason why regards how he received his medals. Hemingway plainly writes, “... I had been given the medals because I was an American” (Hemingway). This short sentence captures the feeling the rest of the world felt about America in World War I. Americans had come into the war towards the end with great enthusiasm and cockiness that European soldiers

His short story “Soldier’s Home” is about a soldier who comes home later than everyone else. The war greatly impacts him and changes the way he thinks in his daily life. At home, people do not want to hear the horrors he went through. They want to the hear the beauty of war the nation had promised them with exaggerated stories of manliness and victoriousness. These lies bother Krebs, the main character. He quite literally becomes sick from the sickening lies the United States government told to sell the war to the public. Hemingway writes, “Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration…” (Hemingway). The disillusionment physically impacts Krebs, as well as the majority of all World War I soldiers. He can no longer tell a lie because he is mindful of the harm it can do to a person. He does not even want to talk to girls in fear that he would tell a lie to them by force of habit. Hemingway writes, “He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her… He did not want to tell anymore lies. It wasn’t worth it” (Hemingway). Lies are the main focus of this short story and for a respectable reason. Disillusionment is such a prevalent idea in this era, and Hemingway shows how much it really impacted people. Soldiers had no way of expressing their thoughts because no one around them could understand. The only people who truly understood them were the other soldiers. It makes living a “normal” life hard for those who come back to a place different from where they first left. The main character shows this when he talks to his mother he used to love. Kreb says to his mother, “I don’t love anybody” (Hemingway). Love is such a hard bond to break and showing that war can break not only a relationship, but a person illustrates the strength war hostility has on the brain. The disillusionment of a