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. In “Soldier’s home” Krebs is completely different from when he left for the marines. He no longer sees the world the same. Instead he sees it as a place stuck in time with very little changes. He has to lie about things that happen in war to be able to stomach what truly happen. “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it”(1). Krebs often thinks how complicated normal life is. He looks at the girls with their fancy hair dos and the way the dress. He sometimes thinks it would be ok to have a women but it’s too complicated to even try. That’s what the army taught him. “He wanted to live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that” (2). Krebs mentions the army a lot throughout the story which can make one draw the conclusion that maybe the reason why Krebs is the way he is, is because the condition and standards he was... ... middle of paper ... ... he doesn’t love her but he eventually says sorry. This shows Krebs is really confused on what to say now. He no longer wants to tell lie to the people around him and he stills feels like life will just be too complicated with the lies he’ll have to tell and the job he doesn’t want. “He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it” (7). Krebs may forever feel alone in this world that seems stuck in time. He may never feel how he felt before joining the marines. Krebs is living a life that he feels is much too complicated for him. He is no longer the same person he was two years ago. The person he once was is now somewhere buried deep beneath the lies he tells every day to bare the things he has done. Krebs is still fighting a war, not a physical war, but a war within himself.
A true war story blurs the line between fact and fiction, where it is neither true nor false at the same time. What is true and what is not depends on how much you believe it to be. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” from the novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the author provides various definitions to how the validity of a war story can be judged. The entire chapter is a collection of definitions that describe the various truths to what a true war story is. Unlike O’Brien, who is a novelist and storyteller, David Finkel, the author of “The Good Soldiers”, is a journalist whose job is to report the facts. Yet in the selection that we read, chapter nine, Finkel uses the convention of storytelling, which relies heavily on the stories the combat troops tell each other or him personally. Finkel attempts to give an unbiased view of the Iraq war through the stories of the soldiers but in doing so, Finkel forfeits the use of his own experiences and his own opinions. From O’Brien’s views on what a true war story is combined with my own definitions, I believe that Finkel provides a certain truth to his war stories but not the entire truth.
Many people say that the metal of a man is found in his ability to keep his ideals in spite of anything that life can through at you. If a man is found to have done these things he can be called a hero. Through a lifelong need to accept responsibility for all living things, Robert Ross defines his heroism by keeping faith with his ideals despite the betrayal, despair and tragedy he suffers throughout the course of The Wars by Timothy Findley.
The protagonist in “Soldier’s Home,” Harold Krebs, begins lying in the exposition about his experiences in war. The first sentence of the short story says, “Krebs went to the war from a methodist college in Kansas.” Ernest Hemingway depicts Krebs as a religious person because he specifically mentions Krebs going to a methodist college, but later on in the short story readers find that Krebs lies about his faith. When Krebs returns from the war he discovers, “That to be listened to at all he had to lie….” At this point in the exposition Krebs begins his treacherous journey into the world of lying and deceit. Krebs continues by saying, “ His
This explains why we feel for someone who has endured through grief as well as offer our condolences in those moments. These are understandably emotions, feelings for any given tragedy that have occurred, but how would someone who’s come from a place where “...German women were found chained to machine guns…”, or places like “Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel, and in the Argonne… [sites of battles in World War I in which American troops were instrumental in pushing back the Germans.]” be able to understand sympathy and sorrow? Perhaps Krebs cannot feel or show his emotions anymore because no one knew who would be making it back; any personal interaction created room for the emotional toll of loss. This more than likely carried over to what is shown in the story with Krebs’s mother and sister.
In the Soldier’s Home, Harold Krebs comes home a year later than most of his comrades from
The environment in which Kiley was first deployed to lacked rules since authorities were not present to enforce them, the highest ranking NCO’s favorite pastimes ran from “dope to Darvon...there was no such thing as military discipline...You could let your hair grow...didn’t have to polish your boots or snap off salutes, or put up with the usual rear-end nonsense” (91). Thus along with the medical unit, Kiley’s exposure in a medical detachment far away from the tropical warzone gave him a deceptive impression of the Vietnam war. His ingenuous attitude shows that as a young soldier, Kiley had entered the war with a simplistic worldview, unsuspecting of the severity the war brought on to everybody within its sphere of influence. In one of the early chapters, “How To Tell A True War Story”, O’Brien recalled the time Lemon and Kiley went off by themselves after the platoon marched for two days, “A nature hike, [Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon] thought…giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they invented” (69). Kiley is momentarily portrayed as a kid, who is untouched by the harsh realities of the Vietnam War. But the juxtaposition of placing an unsuspecting child in a hostile war zone sets an ominous tone for Rat Kiley. Like most soldiers who had been drafted into the war, Kiley initially did not have the emotional
In a family there is a special bond, but when war becomes part of the family’s life, it slowly deteriorat what was once a loving relationship of the soldier and his/her family to an isolation between the individual and their family. Based on the short story, Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy , TIm O’Brien used imagery to help readers envisioned a soldier desired of returning home. O’ Brien constantly used the word pretend to displayed the relationship between a family and the soldier during war. “He was pretending he was a boy again, camping with his father in the midnight summer along the Des Moines River… He pretended his father would be there by the campfire and they would talk softly about whatever came to mind and then rolled into their sleeping bags, and that they’d wake up and it would be morning, and there would not be a war…” (O’Brien 622) According to O’Brien, soldiers seek for his/her family during stressful circumstances of the war.
In the story “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, the reader is enlightened about a boy who was mentally and emotionally drained from the horrifying experiences of war. The father in the story knows exactly what the boy is going through, but he cannot help him, because everyone encounters his or her own recollection of war. “When their faces are contorted from sucking the cigarette, there is an unmistakable shadow of vulnerability and fear of living. That gesture and stance are more eloquent than the blood and guts war stories men spew over their beers” (Zabytko 492). The father, as a young man, was forced to reenact some of the same obligations, yet the father has learne...
The initial reaction I received from reading Soldier's Home, and my feelings about Soldier's Home now are not the same. Initially, I thought Harold Krebs is this soldier who fought for two years, returns home, and is disconnected from society because he is in a childlike state of mind, while everyone else has grown up. I felt that Krebs lost his immature years, late teens to early 20's, because he went from college to the military. I still see him as disconnected from society, because there isn't anyone or anything that can connect him to the simple life that his once before close friends and family are living. He has been through a traumatic experience for the past two years, and he does not have anyone genuinely interested in him enough to take the time to find out what's going on in his mind and heart. Krebs is in a battle after the battle.
...though people believe that, those on the home front have it just as a bad as the soldiers, because they have to deal with the responsibilities of their husbands, there is nothing that can compare to what these men have gone through. The war itself consumed them of their ideology of a happy life, and while some might have entered the war with the hope that they would soon return home, most men came to grips with the fact that they might never make it out alive. The biggest tragedy that follows the war is not the number of deaths and the damages done, it is the broken mindset derives from being at war. These men are all prime examples of the hardships of being out at war and the consequences, ideologies, and lifestyles that develop from it.
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 first hand observer of the Civil War, the great American Poet, Walt Whitman once said,"The real war [of the mind] will never get in the books."Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a horrible mental ailment that afflicts thousands of soldiers every year. Besides the fact that it is emotionally draining for the soldier, it also deeply alters their family and their family dynamics. Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier's Home” illustrates how this happens. Harold Krebs returns home from World War I. He has to deal with becoming reaccustomed to civilian life along with relearning social norms. He must also learn about his family and their habits. The ramifications of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have a ripple effect on the lives of not only the victim, but also the friends and family they relate to.
Between the two authors, Hemingway and Eliot, a similar idea shows through their writing, connecting them. They both use the common aspect of negative tone to reflect how after being in a war, the purpose that used to drive one’s life grows pointless and irrelevant. In the text of “A Soldier’s Home,” Krebs tells his mother “I don’t love anybody,”(Hemingway) which shows the audience the bitterness which he has attained. One may assume this aggravation comes from war due to Kreb’s mother’s surprise at finding this new attribute. Like “Soldier's Home”, “The Hollow Men” by TS Eliot has an indignant tone that shows the negative responses one returning from war has of their surroundings. Eliot shows the melancholy of his text while saying “our dried
War affects people differently, depending on the person’s morals and their position in the war, whether it be a soldier, family member, or a civilian. Robert Jordan was not necessarily eager to enter the Spanish Civil War in For Whom The Bell Tolls but he knew that he was needed
It is never easy for anyone to be away from his or her own family. Certain situations happen in ones life that forces him to leave his family behind. More often than not, one leave home for a better job elsewhere, keeping in mind that in doing so, he will be able to provide for his family and give a better life. Others, like the ones in the military, have no choice but to do his duty to the country and to help keep the country safe for his family to live in. “Soldier’s Home”, written by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize awardee Ernest Hemingway, talks about the adventure of Krebs, a marine soldier and how his life turns out when he comes back from battle. In analyzing “Soldier’s Home”, I would like to talk about the story’s characters, the theme of