"Soldier's Home" is yet another short story by Ernest Hemingway detailing the experience of returning World War I veterans. Harold Krebs fought in many of the important military engagements in the war and comes home to his small Oklahoma town an obviously changed man.
In the first paragraph Hemingway describes a picture of Krebs with his college fraternity brothers before the war. The description focuses on the rigid uniformity of the men:
There is a picture which shows him among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar.
There is a perfection in this picture. Young men all looking the same on the eve of a great war where they will go off and perform heroically. It is an emotionless picture which cannot predict the horrors that war will bring.
In contrast, the next paragraph describes a picture of Krebs with another soldier and two women. It is much less than perfect. There are no medals showing (in fact the men look disheveled), and the women are not the beautiful creatures befitting heroes. Even the Rhine River, which is part of heroic myth and folklore, is not in the picture. Instead, Hemingway describes two very ordinary men who have not performed heroically.
Later in the story Krebs is unable to tell anyone about the atrocities of the war. Instead, they only want to hear heroic tales, which are lies. Those in the town will accept nothing less than the perfection detailed in the first paragraph picture. They want life to return to how it was before the war, and for men that conform to a particular ideal. Unfortunately, Krebs has been through too much and feels like an outsider, revealing that "Soldier's Home" is an ironic title because Krebs no longer feels at home.
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