Soldiers Home Lit Analysis

English Comp 101

 “Soldier’s Home” Literary Analysis Paper

        “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway is a short story explaining a life about a solider that comes home from war and feels removed from his home life. Hemingway writes this story to explain how conformity is a problem that Krebs has to deal with and how a soldier has many different conflicts with in himself and coming home from war. The theme of conformity is shown through out the story in many different ways.

        In “Soldier’s Home” the main character Krebs is expected to conform to what society thinks is best. Staring out the story Hemingway explains that Krebs went to a Methodist college where “His fraternity brothers all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar” which is the start conformity, by all the fraternity dressing in the same manner. Society often thinks that fraternity brothers are all the same they are all there for the same reasons. The text also tells us that Krebs enlisted in the marines in 1917, which shows that he conformed to what society wanted they wanted men to go fight and help out in the war and it shows that he gave in to conformity because he was home 2 years later.

Krebs also has to conform to living life back at his parent’s house and the rules and expectation that his mother puts on him. Krebs mother in the story pleads for Krebs to be like other boys and for him to get a job and find a good girl to get married to. But being the military man that he was he felt as though women were a waste of time and feelings. Krebs starts off not conforming to his mother’s rules but he soon sees how he has upset her and after that incident he tries to conform to his mom rules by telling her that he really does love her and that he will try to be a better boy. Krebs was set up to be more of an outcast for the fact that he came back from war later than all the other men and people expected him to be back and normal since many people had already heard the war stories.  In this text Krebs feels like he has to lie to fit in with society because they wont accept the truth because no one wants to make time to listen to his story because they’ve heard it time and time again. Society wants Krebs to jump back to the time that they are in and Krebs cannot do that because he is dealing with issues that happened in the war and he is just looking for some one to listen.