Lit. As communiation - Reflective Entry

Literature as Communication

Assignment #1: Response Essay Danielle Mair

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Question: Explain how Krebs war experiences are present throughout the story.

Ernest Hemingway’s Story Soldier’s Home is a story that depicts the life of a soldier after coming home from the war. While reading the story you find that there are two distinctive narrators; the first is objective and tells the story with explicit honesty because this “voice” is not acknowledged by Harold Krebs consciousness. Krebs is in fact the protagonist narrator. “There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls.”(Hemingway) This narrator is simply giving you the facts, without tainting this knowledge with personal feelings and emotions. While the other is a voice that comes through Krebs consciousness.“You don’t need a girl unless you thought about them. He learned that in the Army.”(Hemingway) Gives you not only insight into how Krebs thinks but always shows you that there are in fact two people telling this story. The bias is that Krebs has now given his opinion on the situation with girls.

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The presence of Harold Krebs war experiences are read throughout the text; his behaviour and narrative are affected by them as well. Harold Krebs had just returned to what he once considered home. Now however, he finds himself lingering in time. He knows for a fact that he has changed, and this change is very drastic and dramatic but his town and world around him managed to stay the same with only slight changes. “Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up.”(Hemingway) You see that the war is ever present because it has stripped Harold Krebs of his ability to determine what he’d like to do after the war. He is lost time so to speak, simply taking a routine of staying up late, sleeping in and practicing his musical instrument. A place where only he knows of because there is nothing that he’s connected to in his town anymore; Krebs changed but he sees’ his town as being the same. His justification for this is that his father parks his car in the exact same spot, the car hasn’t changed. “Now after the war it was still the same car.”(Hemingway) The office in which his father works in is still on the second floor inside the National Bank building.

Harold Krebs states that girls or women are too complicated for his liking. “Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. But here at home it was all too complicated.”(Hemingway) During the war this implies it was easy to find women. They did not want to talk. “He thought about France, and then he thought about Germany.”(Hemingway) Krebs enjoys living in the past; his experiences with women during the war were pleasant. He did not want to have to deal with all the pressures and expectations that the women in his town came with. Throughout the story you see that Krebs has lost value in the systems that his town values most. In the first paragraph our first narrator states that Harold went to a Methodist school. His town and family values religion a system in which Krebs no longer holds dear because of his experience. His experience with war has dulled his emotions; He lies numerous times, shows a lack of interest in human contact because he is emotionally alone. Krebs wants to talk but there is no one to listen. Fellow soldiers and towns people are not interested in his stories; his lies have to do with his inward battle with himself. You see this very blatantly when he tells his mother he does not love her. His mother, not being able to relate to Harold’s experiences does not understand the horror her son had witnessed has forever changed him. He is not able to love because he’s not within a stable capacity to do so.

Krebs war experiences are present throughout the story because each aspect of his life is intertwined. Each interaction, conversation and thought is related to the war. The way he thinks and acts are the way in which his consciousness is directing him. The objective narrator has no bias but Krebs relates every emotion and situation to the war time. The war is prevalent throughout the story because his consciousness is the second narrator.