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Essay / The Struggles of Harold Krebs After Returning from World War I
In "Soldier's Home," Ernest Hemingway uses the setting of a small town to give his readers a glimpse into the troubled young mind of Harold Krebs . Harold Krebs struggles to adjust to life in Hemingway's lifeless Oklahoma town soon after his late return from the fighting of World War I. Hemingway's social environment in "Soldier's Home" contributes to its familial, yet dull, atmosphere that Krebs must attempt to cope with. . Hemingway uses many aspects of setting, constructively combining place and time, as well as the social environment present in "Soldier's Home", to develop a monotonous atmosphere that resembles Krebs' sentiment. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayHemmingway produces a location for the reader: an Oklahoma town during the boom of the 1920s, to which Harold Krebs returns after having served his country in World War I, only to find that almost everything is the same, with only a few changes in his settings. Krebs finds Hemingway's world far too complicated underneath, for its simplicity on the surface; Krebs takes special notice of the young girls of the town, mostly from the comfort of his front porch: Nothing has changed in the town except that the young girls have grown up. But they lived in such a complicated world of already-defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs felt neither the energy nor the courage to enter it. But he loved looking at them. There were so many pretty young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short. When he went away, only little girls wore that hair like that, or fast girls. They all wore sweaters and Dutch crew-neck shirts. He was a model. He loved watching them from the porch as they walked across the street. (171) Upon his return, Krebs finds that Hemmingway's town is unchanged; young girls grow up with their own problems, too many for Krebs to worry about just one in particular. Watching pretty girls from the shelter of his porch becomes a pastime; they dress indistinguishably and always wear their hair short. The unchanged girls grow up in Hemingway's setting, bringing Krebs's youthful memories with them, long after Krebs experiences them. Short hair and Dutch collars have become commonplace among young girls. Krebs sees the girls wearing necklaces like he himself used to wear them with his fraternity brothers: "There is a photo that shows him among his fraternity brothers, all wearing exactly the same size and the same collar style” (170). Time doesn't change anything. Hemingway's character spends much of his time at home as well as at the pool hall: "...to pass the hottest hours of the day in the cool darkness of the pool hall. He loved playing billiards” (171). The pool hall, Krebs' second home, is cool and dark, just like the feelings that reside within Krebs. Just as the flat, uniform setting of Hemingway's Oklahoma prairies parallels Krebs's unchanging present-day existence, the pool hall creates a brutal atmosphere applicable to a homogenous civilian context. The details of Hemingway's social environment and the atmosphere they create have a negative effect on the protagonist. , which causes him a lot of difficulty readjusting to his environment. Krebs resides uncomfortably in Hemmingway's town, whose residents only open their ears to dramatized tales of war, prompting Krebs to say, 2005. 170-175.