What Is The Significance Of Krebs In Soldier's Home

Krebs’ personality traits are completely altered around the setting in the short story Soldier’s Home. Ernest Hemingway’s background affects the setting in Soldier’s Home, which affects the characteristics, feelings, patterns, and actions of the main character Krebs.

The author of Soldier’s Home is Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway constructs the main character Krebs to have some of the same personality traits and experiences as he had in his time in the army. Hemingway created a false image of himself to be some kind of war hero, so in an attempt to “soothe his conscience”, he wrote about an unhappy soldier that just returned from war that was later turned into Krebs. ”The relative unhappiness of his personal life in 1924 was instrumental in causing

If his town had more people in it, there would be plenty of people to celebrate with him when he got home. However, it is set in a small town so there are not enough people Krebs soon finds out that he has to lie in order for anyone to pay attention to him. As explained in Performative Patterns, “The setting of postwar Europe differs so greatly from homey Oklahoma so that it became impossible to speak the truth about the war” (Baerdemaeker). Krebs would not have had to embellish his stories like he did if he had just stayed in Europe. “The photo in which the Rhine does not show metaphorizes Krebs’s ongoing inability to represent and validate his experience in a small town that has heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities” (Kennedy and Curnutt). Krebs had been in Europe dealing with the war for so long that he had conformed to the way things worked there. In Soldier’s Home, the narrator says “He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live alone without consequences” (Hemingway). We are not told exactly what he means by the “consequences” that he has been faced with. As readers, we can assume that the consequences are either him having to return back to the United States or him having to go to war in the first place. When he gets back the setting change affects his actions in a way that causes him to lie in order for people to find him more

He did not have the energy to deal with the girls in his home town because he was so used to the girls in Europe. In the story, Krebs says “That was the thing about French and German girls. There was not all this talking” (Hemingway), but there probably was not as much talking because they did not speak the same language. This shows that the change in setting also changed what he was looking for in a girl. The Hemingway review suggests that he did not necessarily care what the German girls looked like, just as long as they did not talk as much as the American girls do. “The German girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the picture” (Kennedy and Curnutt). This shows that he is no longer comfortable with the American girls because they talk so much. This is also where the social aspect comes into play, he would rather sit with a German girl that can’t talk to him than to have an American girl that talks all the