Soldier's Home By Krebs

• Introduction-o Use one or two sentences to express your personal opinions on the subject of the booko State the theme you conclude from the book(thesis)o Describe in general, how the author expresses such theme, i.e. by using characterization, symbolism, setting or conflicts, etc. (this will be where you lead in to your body paragraphs)
• Body-Write three paragraphs to explain how the author expresses the theme in his book. To describe each example, you need to include the following information. o What happened? What did the character do to show the theme?o What did the character say or think (quotes from the character, or the narrator)?o What is the consequence of his/her action?
• Conclusiono Restate your themeo What did you think of the theme? How has it affected you?
he primary theme in Ernest Hemingway's short story "Soldier's Home" is Krebs' inability to relate to his mother and to home life after his return to Oklahoma following World War I. After witnessing death and destruction while participating in some of the war's most bloody battles, Krebs returns home where his parents try to coax him to return to his old routine. But his view of the world has been altered permanently, and attending ball games and dating are no longer easy for him. He no longer feels love in his heart and cannot bring himself to "lie" and tell his mother he still loves her. When he is asked to pray with his mother, he is also unable to do so. In one of Hemingway's most famous lines, "Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate." Like the bacon, his heart has been hardened by what he has seen in Europe, and he knows he must get far away from his parents in order to get his life in order.
Certainly one of the topics that come to mind and stand out resonate in the story's title as they do in our own lives: adaptation. Here is a man who has gone through a life-changing event and has allegedly experienced a series of consequences caused by his own choices. As a result, he has to choose how to re-adapt himself to understanding a life, as he knew it, all over again.
With understanding life again comes a re-birth of mind and consciousness; of reality and truth. He has to re-visit all his value-system, his own mental substenance, traditions, and schema of life and transfer all that towards a new scheme that, in itself, is also new to him. It is hard to imagine being part of a world, then being taken to another, and then being returned to the original world from where you came and -suddenly- it is now completely incomprehensible to you. It is like two zones of reality continuously multiplying without control.
The need to understand, adapt, re-do, revisit, reinstate, and re-start are certainly what makes this story a journey to the main character.
One of the story’s central concerns might be described by a term that was once fashionable: “the generation gap.” In “Soldier’s Home,” the gap is more like a chasm that separates the ex-Marine from the townspeople. Krebs returns from the war, changed by his experiences, but the local citizenry are exactly what they were before the war—sure of themselves and their values. To stay in the town, to survive this time warp, Krebs must compromise his integrity; he must lie if he is to live among people who do not want to hear the truth.
Krebs represents the transformation brought about by World War I, and in this sense his metamorphosis reflects America’s changed face. Before the war, the conventional values of Krebs’s hometown had been, for the most part, America’s values. After World War I, however, those values were challenged, and the war’s returnees were among the chief challengers. In “Soldier’s Home,” the conflict is between challenger and challenged—the tension between Americans moving into the modern world and Americans protecting Victorian
values.
The Soldier’s Home story is about the soldier who has came home after war. A young man – Krebs has a hard time adjusting to life back in his hometown located in Oklahoma. The overarching theme in this short story is the conformity and difficulties in conflict are converse that people do not conform as society expects. The theme of the conformity is easily to seem throughout the story. We are told that Krebs went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas. Krebs did not conform to the expectation of the people in his hometown. He arrived home late from the war unlike the other man who left there to severe the soldier had already returned home to a hero’s welcome. Hemingway wrote that people though it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back to late after the war was over. He did not conform to the expectation.
One theme of conformity that also is presented in the story is that we learn more about the young girl in Krebs’s hometown. We learned that:” There were so many good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short. They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern”. Later in the story we learn that: “Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her”. Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk