SSRJ #2: Ernest Hemingway's, "Soldier's Home"

Perspective and experience shape reality.  The indescribable experiences of the two long years Krebs, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Soldier’s Home”, spent at war change his view of his prototypical American home town.  The people who stayed at home during the war do not understand why their problems, daily activities and hopes for the future, hold so little interest for one of their own who was gone for such a short time.  But for Krebs, the two years at war have made him an alien in his own town.  I can understand how time can change your childhood home.  I grew up in a sleepy college town that was transformed during the years I spent away at college into the heart of Silicon Valley.  Periodically, I would return home and notice small changes, the price of coffee doubled, the small taco bar that became a high-priced restaurant, and the theater with the couches and cats transformed into apartments.  When I moved back and started my career after college, I realized it had become a completely different town.  The professor’s kids had become dot-com millionaires and I was left as the one sarcastic and snarky person in a gold-rush town filled with hope.

Although I changed during college, in my case it was the town itself that changed more than me.  It is war that changes the character Krebs, and Hemingway illustrates this change through descriptive settings.  Before he leaves for war, Krebs is a typical middle-American attending a Methodist college.  Hemingway describes a photograph which shows Krebs fitting in with his surroundings “among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar.” (1)  But, in the very next paragraph, we start to see him change through another picture, this one taken during the war, where along with his Army buddies, he slowly becomes more out-of-place, “too big for their uniforms.” (2)    Forced to lie to hide the atrocities of war, and, perhaps to distance himself from the horror, Krebs starts to paint his own picture of war through rose-colored glasses, by telling tales of “certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers.” (5)  Trying to fit in again, as a typical soldier only makes Krebs feel more alienated.  He can only tell the truth, that he was “frightened all the time” (6) to other soldiers.  Just as we start to understand the change within Krebs, Hemingway declares that “nothing was changed in the town,” (10) and we start to see how the inner change reflects itself through his disengagement.  The closer Krebs is to the town the less he likes it.  “He did not like them when he saw them [girls] in the Greek’s ice cream parlor,” but the further he is from the reality, the better.  “He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street.”  Krebs declares he has left the world of his family when he denies his religion and says “I’m not in His Kingdom,” (63) again curiously using a description of place.  The most profound moment is the contrast between Krebs’ silent response to his mother’s description of her hopes and dreams for her son through comparison to the other boys in town, “…that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being a real credit to the town.”  (68)  Krebs non-response is strengthened when he directly denies his mother’s love after she pushes further and asks her son to “make a start at something.” (70)  The contrast is again heightened by Hemingway’s use of setting, as she asks her son to pray with her “beside the dining-room table,” the heart of any home.  The resolution of the central conflict, Krebs’ alienation from his home town, is told through setting as well, when he decides to “go to Kansas City and get a job.” (95)

The terse dialog in the middle of the story gives the reader a sense of despair and hopelessness.   Krebs casually responds to his sister’s plea for sibling love with one word answers, and definitively responds with a plain “no” when directly asked for love by his mother.  I find it interesting that the first part of the story is told through exposition, with long paragraphs describing the setting and Krebs’ inner turmoil.  But Hemingway switches to dialog for the rest of the story until the last paragraph, which falls back to exposition.  Why the change in technique?  What does he gain from using so much dialog?