Soldiers Home by Ernest Hemingway - Literature review Example

Ernest Hemingway admitted that the Soldier’s Home is the best short story that he ever wrote. The story does become more prominent than the other short story in the collection In Our Time because its main character who is an American soldier in the First World War, is not, as readers might have anticipated, Nick Adams, but the unusually named Harold Krebs. Because it is Hemingway’s single narrative about a war veteran’s homecoming and a story that depicts a conflicted relationship between mother and son, Soldier’s Home has been a greatly debated text in the critics’ circle.

Soldier’s home is the tale of the struggle of a young man to detach himself from home, and Hemingway loaded it with a lifetime of hate and fury. However, the completely remorseless, absolutely inexpert portrayal of Mrs. Krebs as a monster disclosed that the author was actually still enslaved by her flesh and blood. A sense of surpassing a monotonous pattern is the primary theme of Soldier’s Home. The two pictures at the opening of the short story symbolize various modes of normalcy, sets of arrangement or patterns of customs and rules that influence the people they embrace.

Nevertheless, Soldier’s Home is a complex story. But it is a systematically divided one too, separated into two almost equal segments of summary explanation and picturesque development wherein the war wound understanding develops from the first half of the story and the childhood injury interpretation from the remaining half. Hence, unless one is unwise enough to argue on a fixed or dominant meaning, both interpretations have good points. On the contrary, no story can be adequately understood through de-emphasizing half of its content.

Moreover, through taking no notice of the story’s form and simply probing it for sociological and biographical substance, many critics have overlooked Hemingway’s narrative premises as well as the significant art that characterizes it, for what Soldier’s Home truly implies lies on how it means. In spite of the story’s structural division into summary explanation that point to one form of interpretation and scenic progress that point to another, there should be a present relationship that generally derives between these two components of a pragmatist text.

Krebs, in his own distinctively situated, self-pitying perspective, embodies a larger cultural depression gripping countless Americans during the 1920s and shaping considerable fragment of the period’s social experience. Vanishing into a damp, murky pool room, reading newspapers and manuscripts about the war, and restlessly examining young women from his mother’s balcony, this discomfited child of the modern consumer lifestyle has become a hesitant observed in a transitional society where the fading of traditional norms prevents his involvement.

Trapped between the already outdated realms of his parents and a new dimension he is not prepared to enter, all he can do is watch the world without interest as he plays his clarinet; as Krebs drowns ever beyond from his domestic environment, his clarinet-practices, such as those of his other endeavors, considerably gives into indolence and retreat. ReferencesHemingway, Ernest. "Soldiers Home" In Our Time. 1925. New York: Scribners, 1970. 69-77.