Lying in Hemingway\'s Soldier\'s Home

¶ … Lying in Hemingway's Soldier's Home

Like many other of Hemingway's works Soldier's Home reflects the destructive effects of war on the lives of the former soldiers. In his short story, Hemingway emphasizes the impossibility of conveying or sharing the experience of war with the people that have not actually participated in it. Thus, one of the main devices that the author uses here is to focus on the various ways in which lying and pretending are reverberated in the story. The truth about the war cannot be told in words or transmitted as a feeling.

This is what happens to the main character of the story, the former soldier Harold Krebs who has just come back from the front. Surrounded by a loving family that pampers him, he realizes that he is completely unable to communicate. The psychological scars left by the war are so profound that he cannot re-adapt to his own home and regain his tranquility. When he asked about the war, Krebs tells stories that are either invented or heard from others. When those that haven't participated in the war talk about it they do the same thing as Krebs: they reproduce extraordinary stories about the atrocities of war. The only difference between Krebs and the ones that have not actually experienced war is that he realizes how inauthentic these stories really are. Despite the fact that they manage to depict the violence of war, they utterly fail in actually reproducing the feeling given by living the experience as such. Thus, Hemingway emphasizes that one can cannot describe such an irrational and violent experience as the war. It is only the direct and unmediated experience that can create an impression of how it really is.

The characters in Hemingway's story thus inadvertently or consciously lie about war. Krebs is the one who consciously improvises in the desperate attempt to cover the truth about his real experience: "His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers."(Hemingway, 303) Not only did the experience of the war change and affect him in a total way, but, when he returns home, the war becomes an obstacle impossible to surmount in the way of his new life because he is forced to lie about it and about his actual experiences and feelings. We intimate from his indirectly given thoughts, that after the war, everyone taking part in it was in the habit of forging unreal stories, most of them regarding heroism and what the author terms "atrocities." The only thing that he can coherently say about his experience is that he was horribly frightened all the time, "badly, sickeningly frightened all the time," as he tells himself (Hemingway, 303).

Hemingway's short story announces its theme already in the title: the phrase "soldier's home" is a very suggestive linguistic construction. However, the phrase in the title implies more than that- "soldier's home" is a hint at the actual state of things in the story: Krebs did come home from the front, only somehow, he is still a soldier, that is, he is still tremendously affected by the war experience he had been through, and somehow a stranger in his own family and in his own world. He is obviously divided between this world that is supposed to be his own, and his soldier world, the world of the war.