Soldier's Home
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Soldier's Home is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, first collected in In Our Time (1925).
[edit] Plot
The story is a short portrait of a soldier's return from World War I and how he is mentally scarred by his experiences. Harold Krebs is the main character and the story charts his furtive re-integration with his past. Krebs is unable to continue on with his life. He sees that the whole town has moved on and he has lost his emotional connection to the culture he has been separated from.
There are three main movements in the story, told in Hemingway's sparse dialogue. The first consists of a narration of Krebs' return to his hometown and the disconnection between Krebs' mixed feelings of both repulsion from the war and his romantic feeling of purpose and cameraderie in it, and the townspeople's lack of gratitude for or interest in his experiences. The second section is mostly Krebs' sentiments of eyeing women in the town and wanting female company without the complexities of relating to them; to him "It was not worth it." In the third section there is a dialogue between Krebs and his mother in which his lack of enthusiasm for reintegrating himself into his hometown life is highlighted.
The story ends in uncertainty, as Krebs maintains that he doesn't care about anything, including his mother, but feels sorry for having hurt her feelings; Krebs half-heartedly decides to look for work in Kansas City to satisfy her.
Hemingway himself worked for the Kansas City Star in the same time period. The story may be seen as semi-autobiographical, or as a depiction of the emotional difficulties faced by a returning soldier to his home culture.
| Ernest Hemingway Books |
| Novels: The Torrents of Spring | The Sun Also Rises (¡Fiesta!) | A Farewell to Arms | To Have and Have Not | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Across the River and Into the Trees | The Old Man and the Sea | Adventures of a Young Man | Islands in the Stream | The Garden of Eden |
| Non-fiction: Death in the Afternoon | Green Hills of Africa | The Dangerous Summer | A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 | Under Kilimanjaro |
| Short story books: Three Stories and Ten Poems | In Our Time | Men Without Women | Winner Take Nothing | The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories | The Snows of Kilimanjaro | The Essential Hemingway | The Hemingway Reader | The Nick Adams Stories | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | The Collected Stories |
