Thursday, February 3, 2011

SSRJ #2

                                                 SSRJ #2                               Brent McDonald
                                                                                                        English 1b
Ernest Hemingway- Soldiers Home

Just finished reading “soldiers home” by Ernest Hemingway, I feel like I can truly relate to the character “Krebs” in this short story. He leaves his home town for a couple years only to come back and find nothing has changed except his once simple world is now so complex. He feels desensitized to love and is losing hope and doesn’t feel he needs affection in his life. This piece made me think about my return home from college after spending two years living in San Diego, I find I need to adapt to a more complex lifestyle than I was once a custom to when I previously lived there. When trying to interpret this short story you can see the author is trying to perceive a certain message through the main character, Krebs. He portrays krebs as a lost soldier trying to adapt to a new society who must indulge in a book to really understand what he had been doing for the past two years. This story interprets that one may go years without discovering the true meaning of what they are doing, and this meaning can be found in various ways. One question I am curious to know is, How common is our soldiers coming back from war completely desensitized to love?
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2 comments:

  1. Kayla C.February 5, 2011 at 1:55 AM

    Brent,
    I really like how you point out Krebs' desensitization(is that even a word?) to love but when you think about it, he is desensitized to everything. I think the war drained his energy and now that he's back home, he really doesn't care about anything except that he doesn't want to be there. Also, I found the title of the story pretty ironic considering that he doesn't feel home at all. Krebs feels out of place even though this was all he knew before the war. I think thats one of Hemingway's literary elements in the story as well.

    In regards to your question, I think its MORE rare than it used to be that our soldiers come home in such a messy state like Krebs. Obviously PTSD(Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) occurs, but I think that society has become better with listening to what soldiers have to say, unlike in this story. For example, counseling and such.

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  2. AmandaNFebruary 8, 2011 at 11:38 PM

    I like how you saw it as when he got back he had to discover what he had been doing, I hadn't thought about it like that. I believe him to have come back to such a complex world that he wishes he was back in the war, which was what he knew. As for the soldiers who come home nowadays, it depends on the experiences they face, everyone is different and when added to a stressful situation anything could change them. Just going through boot camp and tech school changes a person, but that is what they set out to do.

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