Manos Mathew
English 206
Prof D.S
"Soldier's Home" by Ernest Hemingway is a magnificent short story that illustrates the tragic effects of war on a young soldier's life, as he tries to come home. This story helps paint a vivid picture of the type of life a soldier faced after coming back from a traumatic experience.
The main character in this story is Harold Krebs. Krebs had recently returned from World War I to move back into his parent's house, while he is attempting to figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. An interesting characteristic to see in Krebs is how he reacts to the world around him, as he had to come back home from war. Krebs lived in Oklahoma, where this story takes place. "He enlisted in the Marines in 1917 and did not return to the United States until the summer of 1919."(Meyer
Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918
Ernest Hemingway in Milan.
Ernest Hemingway's house- Key West, FL145). Hemingway presents a chronologically ordered piece, in that all the events are sequenced at one particular time where Krebs has come back from the war. There are references to the past; this is just to obtain an idea of what was going on in general and in the mind of Krebs. This piece is also written in the third-person limited omniscient, where the narrator focuses on the struggles of one particular character while mentioning other characters as well. In this case the struggle that is evaluated is Krebs'.
This type of work is typical of some of Hemingway's works. He places an emphasis on characters that have fallen to traumatic circumstances and how they react to the situation around them. Basically he emphasizes how the characters' change from the situation they face. For instances "Hemingway's best stories, such as "The Killers" and "In Another...