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?

SSRJ#1: “A Sorrowful Woman” by Gail Godwin

The emotional content of Gail Godwin’s short story, “A Sorrowful Woman,” provided a glimpse inside the mind of a distant and detached woman, completely outside my personal experience.  Reading this story was not unlike the escapism at the heart of formula fiction, but with a decidedly different slant.  I was taken on a trip inside a mind completely different from my own, escaping from my own reality.  For a brief time, I was able to understand how a person might, through the natural course of events, grow apart from reality and into a quiet world of their own construction.   I was struck by the lack of explicit events or justifications for this woman’s depression.

As an engineer, and a male, I tend to be drawn to action and reason, and have more difficulty understanding a story about emotion and feelings.  Godwin’s plain descriptions of daily events painted a picture of emotional solitude by their contrast to the understanding and loving actions of the husband.  We see this contrast in early descriptions where the woman’s actions have almost no content at all, “She got up on Monday and moved about the house till noon.”   Meanwhile the rest of her family is filled with energy,  “The boy, delighted to have her back, pretended he was a vicious tiger and followed her from room to room, growling and scratching” (6).  Later, the same contrast is repeated as the woman slowly withdraws, again painting a simple picture as she moves into the “girl’s white room.  She put her hairbrush on the dresser; she put a note pad and pen beside the bed.” (20)   At this point, her family is becoming more distant, along with the descriptions of their activities from her perspective.  Still, we can feel their love when the husband “squeezed his wife’s pale arm” and “sat for a long time with his head in his hands.” (25)  The distinct lack of emotion in the heroine is made stronger by its contrast against the love of her family.   I was surprised that the use of such a simple plot could paint such a clear emotional picture.

I am curious to know the “why” and the “what” that led to our heroine’s condition, but we are left to wonder.  We are given glimpses of her fear and guilt when she locks herself away after being scratched, and says “I’m such a burden.” (15)  The emotions are described, but not the cause.  Clearly, at some earlier point, she felt quite differently.  She met and married a loving husband and formed a family.  She understands the simple rewards of baking a loaf of bread for her family.  But somewhere along the way, the love became smothering:  “The force of the two joyful notes slipped under her door that evening pressed her into the corner of the little room; she had hardly space to breathe.”  (33)  What events caused this change?  We now understand that depression is a chemical imbalance.  Unlike what we’ve been taught by literature, that character arcs are driven by plot, depression has no identifiable cause.  It is precisely that lack of plot, and the simplicity of the descriptions, that mirrors the lack of love and emotion in our heroine.

References:

Godwin, Gail,  “The Sorrowful Woman,” The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 8^th Edition, Editor Michael Meyer, Boston, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.  Pg 39-43.

Welcome!

I guess it is time to start reading again!

When I was younger, I read voraciously. As a teenage boy, I read all the classics -- over and over. I must have read "The Once and Future King" five times from cover to cover. Science Fiction soon followed, and I devoured the classic Robot and Foundation series by Asimov, Orson Scott Card's "Ender's" series, and dozens more. I loved the images these novels painted of fantastical places and magical worlds.

Then I discovered computers and graphics. My reading transitioned into writing code to create graphical images. I loved seeing the mathematical formulas become pixels and the pixels become images. Pure math visualized as art. It was addictive.

Somewhere along the way, my desire to create images transitioned into a love for creating tools for true artists. Soon, I managed to find a way to work as a professional software developer at a film company creating software for computer generated movies. I learned the joys of seeing hundreds of artists and technical people combine their efforts to produce a work of art. Like a symphony, the resulting images has a scope and grandeur that exceed the capabilities of any single artist.

Unfortunately, along the way, I stopped reading novels and started reading technical papers. Without thinking, suddenly years passed since I had read any fiction. Occasionally I'd read a non-fiction book that supported my worldview, or one describing the workings of some crazy group. My wife, a constant reader, recommended book after book. Some I would start, read a page or twelve, and then leave on the bedside table, forever closed.

Now, once again, the time has come to read! Oddly unlike the classes I took when I was younger, I'm excited and eager to begin my homework. Perhaps I'll be lucky enough to have it once again inspire me to find new ways of expressing myself creatively through writing and my professional work!