Soldier's home Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Soldier's home - Essay Example t at social gatherings, "he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time." (Hemingway 153). Unlike, ordinary peoples conception of home as a secure and safe haven, Krebs home is a soldiers home where he is always on the alert for the unexpected; he is frightened all the time; and he has learned to not to believe in anything. His lifes associations are not the beautiful girls, belief in God, honor, work, friendship or love for ones family. Instead, he believed in these elements as instruments to survival and diversions. In the picture of himself with a corporal and two German girls for instance, indicates that they have been acquaintances who had passed sometimes with him but do not have any significant meanings. Krebs disillusionment of his hometown and people stems from his post at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Shampagne, St. Mihiel and the Argonne, where the battles had been the most fierce and bloody. These battles have had a deep impact on Krebs yet he is reluctant to talk about them. This is partly because people in Kansas already "had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities" and partly because these experiences have more value to him than his audience. He has found lying to make himself heard by his hometown too demeaning, and hence have been unwilling to degrade his memory and experience of war. Instead, Krebs has assumed a secluded lifestyle so that he does not have to encounter such situations when he had to lie about his war experiences. He avoids active socialization with the community whether through work or interaction with women. He finds that to get involved in any of these socialization processes, he would have to lie and lying is too complicated for him. He feels that untruth and exaggeration would eradicate his memory of the war, which is his actual reality. For him his hometown and its people are the enchantment which he had taken to the war and