The beginning of the poem starts out very depressing, the soldier talks as if they are old men on their death beds. ""Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge"(2), this line implies how miserable the soldier 's are, their sick, weak, and enduring unbearable conditions. They are walking toward their camp, which the poem tells us is quite a distance away. But they are so tired they are sleeping as they walk toward the camp. These men don 't even have sufficient clothing, some have lost their boots and most are covered in blood. "Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of tried, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind"(6-7). This line tells us that these men are so exhausted they have become numb to the war and blood-shed around them. The soldier 's have become numb to the 5.9 inch caliber shells flying by their heads, the bombs bursting behind them, and their fallen comrades body 's lying next to them.…
The short story “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway talk about Krebs’s internal conflict. He is a soldier from Oklahoma who experienced the monstrosities of The Great War. He enlisted in the Marines in 1917 and did not come back home until the summer of 1919. When he came back, though, he was not himself anymore. He does not want to talk to anyone after telling lies to the people and his friends about what happened to him in the war because “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities.” (187). He just reads his book and sits on the porch and watch girls walk down the street. One morning his mother came into his bedroom to…
Both Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” relate to the theme of hopelessness during the lost generation. Remarque’s story is set during the war from a younger German soldier, Paul, through him the suffering and difficulties are presented as fruitless and with out a main goal to look forward to when they return home. Throughout the military travels of the younger soldiers like Paul, Remarque’s view on wars disadvantages on people are clearly stated through the eyes of Paul. Towards the end of his life, he grows happy to die and is glad to pass away from all the pain emotionally and physically he and his comrades had to endure during the battle. Carrying on through the book is the sense of empty hopelessness that nothing will become good and…
In the short story, “Soldier’s home,” the protagonist deals with difficult conflicts within himself and with others. Ernest Hemmingway shows us what it is like for the soldier, Harold Krebs, who returned home, to Kansas, from World War I in 1917, three years after the end of the war. He did not get celebrated like all the other soldiers that returned home causing some major conflict in the story.…
In “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway, the character’s emotions and behavior is most significant. The main character, Krebs describes his time since he has been home and expresses his emotions and thoughts as he comes back to regular life. He has a tough time with this however. When he first got home, he was willing to try and re-enter society, yet nobody wanted to hear the truth about what happened. They all wanted lies. Hemingway wrote, “ Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it…Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie.” (187) I believe this altered his mental state later. Lying and not being able to tell the truth made him nauseated as well as forced him to isolate himself from others and hold all…
In a letter to his wife, Robert E. Lee said, “What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world” (Lee). This destruction can be seen in John Dante, the soldier from Cynthia Rylant’s I Had Seen Castles, and Harold Krebs, the veteran from Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home.” Although John and Krebs face their suffering in different ways, these battle-scarred protagonists change in unique and similar ways. Upon returning from the war, John moves away from his home to find peace while Krebs stays home. Despite where the soldiers are geographically, both are in a new battle against their own thoughts; John and Krebs suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) forcing them to react…
In this short story the narrator wanted to express the loneliness the soldiers felt and distressed because of the lives lost in this War was catastrophic. The narrator also uses his own personal experiences from Vietnam, thus allowing him to cope. Later on in the story you also see the slight psychological damages the soldiers will have.…
Decades before the recognition of PTSD as a legitimate disorder, Hemingway illustrates Kreb’s inability to reestablish himself into society. Kreb has returned years after most others to find no one interested in his war stories. When he realizes that even his exaggerated lies interest no one, Krebs slowly disconnects himself. Since his return, Krebs does the same routine every day: he sleeps late, reads history books on the war, and walks around town. Krebs notes, “nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up.” The only thing to have dramatically changed is Krebs himself, a result of his experiences in the war. Though he is at home, it does not feel like home to him. Unable to return to his earlier life, Krebs chooses isolation instead. However, unlike Bartleby, Harold Krebs has not given up on life. He simply wants his life to go smoothly and without any conflicts. For example, when he sees women walking around the town, he likes the look of them, but he does not want to have to talk to them or get involved in the complexities of courtship. Worried for their son, Kreb’s parents express their concerns that he needs to find a job. They even offer him the car to take out one night. However, Krebs cannot find the incentive to start a new life on his own. When Krebs has an emotional confrontation with his mother over…
Soldiers have trouble adjusting back into a normal society following war, because war is all they know. In the short story “Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway, the main character Krebs, returns from war, and has trouble adjusting to regular life. At the ice cream parlor in his town, Krebs sees a group of women ahead of him and starts to think that he does not need a girl in his life. Krebs believes that when “[he] is ripe for a girl [he] will get one” and that there is absolutely no reason to have a women in his life (Hemingway 2). He is trying to convince himself that he is no longer…
Ernest Hemingway’s Soldiers Home discusses a young man who lives his life in solitude after returning home from the war. Harold Krebs, a World War I veteran, attended school at a Methodist college in Kansas but enlisted in the Marines in 1917. Krebs now lives at home with his father, mother and two sisters where he spends his days reading books or playing pool. Krebs is careful to keep his life simple due to the fact that he isn’t fond of change. Is Harold Krebs apprehensive to making a change in his daily lifestyle?…
Ever wondered what the life of a soldier would be once they are home? Will the life of a soldier ever be the same? Through many generations of adolescents, they have gone from a peaceful environment to experiencing the war. Many have witnessed the catastrophes and devastations that occur during the war. The adjustment from two years on the field of World War I to the ordinary everyday life of a small Oklahoma town can be tough. Harold Krebs in Ernest Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home, has a tough time adjusting to his home life than most soldiers would when they return home. Krebs was expected to conform back into society’s expectations with not much time to adapt back into his life not being surrounded by war. Harold Krebs ignores his surrounding…
In the story these soldiers were effected emotionally in a great way. In story states, "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to." In this quote we can see their fears and their happiness through these things. The way they couldn’t just get over the tragedies and terrors of war, their beliefs, the things that pull them apart and the things that bound them together. It really made me feel how emotional they felt in this troubling time whether it as good or bad.…
Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” is a tremendous story about a young soldier’s battle to find himself after returning from the war. In this story, Hemingway’s character Krebs leaves for the war as a young upscale college student and returns a couple of years later out of touch with society and lost within himself. The main conflict in the story is the struggle in which Krebs faces as he tries to rediscover where he belongs not only in the world, but also inside himself.…
The emotional burdens of a soldier are very high. During the war they develop pride and reputation not to be afraid and if they do not to show it. If they are to show it then it can be a weakness for the enemy to exploit or even for a cruel friendly to be rude upon. Also being away from their family makes them long for them and miss their loved ones. After the war it doesn’t get much better either, the men that survive it begin to carry guilt, grief, and confusion. They are always trying to come to terms with all that happened in the war through storytelling but this does not always work.…
“Conflicts” among characters in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” helps the reader to understand the main character’s feelings and physical conditions - depression. The story starts with two different pictures showing Krebs before and after joining the army. The author stages the story of Krebs’s inner conflict to the relationship with his family. Indeed, the author leaves a lot of doubts that make the reader believe Krebs had pain of heart broken while in the war. The author does not directly describe the cruelty of war that Krebs experienced; however, through the conflicts among the characters in the story, readers can assume how the post young soldiers had suffered in the war and understand their trauma by the aftermath.…