'Soldier's Home': Of Broken Hearts and Souls

In the works of Ernest Hemingway, that which is excluded is often as significant as that which is included; a hint is often as important and thought-provoking as an explicit statement. This is why one must read and reread him to enjoy the true flavor of his writing. 'Soldier's Home' is a prime example of this art of echo and indirection.

Harold Krebs, the protagonist of 'Soldier's Home', is a young veteran portrayed as suffering from an inability to readjust to society - Krebs suffers from returning to the familial, social, and religious "home". Moreover, the story is also about a conflicted mother-son relationship. Krebs' small-town mother cannot comprehend her son's struggles and sufferings caused by the war. She devotes herself to her religion and never questions her own values; she manipulates her son. She is one of the Hemingway 'overbearing mothers' who also appear in 'The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife' and 'Now I Lay Me'. Her sermons to her son lack any power to heal his spiritual wounds. She has determined that Krebs should live in God's "Kingdom," find a job, and get married like the other local boys. The husband

"...a distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them ...lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost to themselves."

Ultimately, 'Soldier's home' is a sophisticated story of a man wounded on various emotional levels. Of a boy matured to manhood through death, pillage and destruction of war. The message ultimately here is quite clear-cut and is meant to lash out at the falsities portrayed of war and its implications on the psych of young idealistic men who all but loose their ideals in the unreal furor of death and destruction that is war. This story however, also is a reflection on Hemingway himself as it is thought that he too went through similar circumstances and repercussions after his tour of duty during World War I. Infact, it is a more refined and distanced treatment of Hemingway's own experiences during and after the war. This is the reason why one can almost feel what the young protagonist of Ernest Hemingway feels throughout the story, of a young man loosing beliefs and then finding and redefining them after a painful process.

Ironically, Hemingway uses the terms "alliances" and "feuds," words better suited to conflicts between nations and families, to describe the girls' complicated world. Moreover, he uses related terms to describe Krebs' feelings towards that world: "He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics." By emphasizing discord and friction, such terms suggest a conflict already experienced by Krebs, a conflict further revealed as follows:

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest the models of proper human behavior nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done."

The repetition of "consequences" sounds too portentous for the previous problem to have been a merely casual love affair.

The discontinuity between Krebs' prewar and postwar periods is obvious. Through the experience of battle, he seems to have lost his belief in God and the Kingdom which his mother claims. Krebs is isolated, having lost all feeling of belonging or togetherness. But he is attracted by the girls' "patterns" which represent their identification with a group, an identification he once shared. Perhaps his is a bitter and only half-realized nostalgia. Here is a veteran, a possibly heartbroken young man, who keeps himself away from the complex world, stays on the porches, and simply watches girls on the street.

"But they [the girls] lived in such a complicated world of already defined

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Approximate Word count = 1785
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)