Preview

Emotions And Behavior In Soldier's Home By Ernest Hemingway

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
412 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Emotions And Behavior In Soldier's Home By Ernest Hemingway
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

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Willmott, H. P. _The American Heritage History of World War 1_. Vol. Vol. 1. New York, New York: American Heritage Co., 1964. Print.…

    • 1806 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 686 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kerbs returned home from war without the intent to write memoirs about his experience, tell his story, or teach people. When Kerbs returned home he refused to speak about the war, which is understandable, however when he did chose to talk about it, it was long over. Kerbs then began to lie about his experience, however they too became boring, as Hemmingway writes, “Even his lies were not…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    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…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    War is a terrible thing. It destroys lives and can forever change the landscape of the mind and soul. Harold Krebs from Ernest Hemingway’s story “Soldier’s Home” and Norman Bowker from Tim O’Brian’s story “Speaking of Courage” both show that coming home from a military lifestyle and reintegrating themselves into a civilian lifestyle can be both difficult and emotionally draining to one’s self esteem and psyche.…

    • 1256 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The war has really affected his social skills. Before the war Krebs was a normal kid. In a college fraternity and had a lot of friends. Being in the war really changed his personality. Krebs is probably suffering from a form of Post traumatic stress syndrome. In his eyes, no one will ever understand what hell he went through, so why bother talking to anyone about it. He came home later than all the other soldiers, and he didn't get the warm welcome home like he was expecting. So having this happen to him pushed him further away from what he is used to. Which is likely to have increased his post stress, where in turn increased his thought that no one will understand or care, so why…

    • 482 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Harold Krebs Character

    • 762 Words
    • 4 Pages

    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?…

    • 762 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a complex anxiety disorder that may develop when individuals experience or witness an event perceived as a threat or experience fear, terror, or helplessness (McNulty). Many men and women who return from a war suffer from this including characters from Ernest Hemingway's stories like Harold Krebs from "Soldier's Home." The story revolves around the character named Harold Krebs who has just returned from war as a distant and unapproachable man with PTSD (Hemingway). When Ernest Hemingway returned from World War I, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Lohano and El-mallakh state that PTSD has a certain relationship with bipolar disorder because both mania and depression may be perceived as traumatic or because events in the course of the illness may increase the risk of severe traumatic events.…

    • 356 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Many authors have written war stories and about the effects of war on a person. Two of these writers are Tim O'Brian and Ernest Hemingway. O'Brian wrote "How to Tell a True War Story"; and Hemingway wrote a short story called "Soldier's Home". Both of these stories illustrate to the reader just what war can do to an average person and what, during war, made the person change. The stories are alike in many respects due to the fact that both authors served time in the army; O'Brian in the Vietnam War and Hemingway in WWI. However, the stories do have differences due to the slightly different themes and also the different writing techniques of the authors.…

    • 740 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” Hemingway demonstrates how a person can go from having a perfectly normal life to being thrown into complete disorder and losing all faith. Hemingway shows how Krebs could not face the people he once knew, and how he cannot talk about what he really did and seen. Also Hemingway shows how Krebs lost complete hope and faith within…

    • 963 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In "Soldier's Home" through the historical setting of World War I, , Hemingway describes Harold Krebs having trouble adjusting to society, lying to himself, and observing no longer interacts with people even his family; however, Krebs must lie to stay in the town and to survive from between reality and truth. As a result, he has to choose how to re-adapt himself not to fall behind the line of…

    • 623 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Experts often agree that to write an extraordinary piece of literature, the author must write of his, or her, first-hand knowledge or experience, of a subject matter; and Ernest Hemingway knew this. He was best known for his plain spoken, straightforward, no-frills writing style. Plain words, simple sentences, and frequent repetition earned him the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. He was a literary scholar. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a magnificent result of literary magnificence that combines its author’s real life experiences and writing perfection. The five-book fiction novel contains autobiographical elements in its core. As one of the best American writers of the early 20th century, Hemingway rolls his personal experiences together with fiction and serves us an exquisite work of art that keeps readers craving for more. A Farewell to Arms was one of Ernest Hemingway's greatest novels, because it was based on his own experiences.…

    • 1265 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Literature is an autonomous artwork. It can be interpreted from its own part. The relation of parts of a literature work creates meaning. The meaning obtained from relation of parts in literary work is unreliable. A Farewell to Arms is a novel which showed that unreliability. That novel reveals ambiguous feeling between love and lust in Henry. This essay attempts to reveal the unreliability of meaning through the deconstructive analysis.…

    • 2588 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    When one reads “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway one may find themselves wondering many things. Throughout the entire story the Indians are referred to as “Indians.” The woman giving birth is always called “the Indian woman,” and Uncle George’s shout of “Damn squaw bitch,” leads many to believe that Hemingway considered the Indians inferior. One may also begin to question why a Doctor was so unprepared for a surgery and whether he came unprepared because it was an Indian woman. These observations have led many to believe that Ernest Hemingway felt that Caucasians were superior, meaning that Indians were inferior in comparison. However, my research shows that Hemingway did not feel that the Indians were inferior; instead Hemingway had a great interest in primitive societies and was inspired by them.…

    • 1237 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    There are many literary elements an author creates in pieces of writing. An important technique that every writing has is theme. There are also many literary techniques used to develop the theme, such as foreshadowing, diction, and imagery. In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway demonstrates the unforeseeable reality of war through similes, horrific imagery, and the first person perspective to develop the theme fear is found among all soldiers.…

    • 764 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays