{"id":17113,"date":"2025-11-16T15:27:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T23:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/?p=17113"},"modified":"2025-11-19T14:14:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T22:14:40","slug":"soldiers-home-personal-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/soldiers-home-personal-response\/","title":{"rendered":"“Soldier’s home”-Personal response"},"content":{"rendered":"

What struck me most about Soldier\u2019s Home<\/em> wasn\u2019t the plot at all, it was the emptiness surrounding Krebs. Hemingway writes Krebs and his life with such a flat, unemotional tone that I honestly found it unsettling. I kept thinking that if I met someone like Krebs in real life, I would feel a little afraid, not because he\u2019s violent, but because he feels emotionless.<\/em>There\u2019s something unpredictable about a person who doesn\u2019t seem to register joy, affection, or even anger. When he says he doesn\u2019t really care about girls because it\u2019s \u201ctoo complicated\u201d (I. 58-59), I felt like maybe he had lost interest in his previous interest before, meaning he is depressed.<\/p>\n

One moment that really bothered me was when Krebs admits there were things he \u201cliked\u201d about the war or the structure of the military (I.92). I understand that people talk about the brotherhood of soldiers or how military life gives you routine, but enjoying ANY part of war feels disturbing to me. War is not just uniforms and camaraderie, it\u2019s gas attacks, tanks, body parts in mud, and dead soldiers twisted across the ground in shapes no human body should be in. The fact that Krebs feels more at ease with that past than with ordinary conversations in his own hometown made me feel uneasy. It made me realize how deeply the war must have damaged him.<\/p>\n

What stood out even more was how hollow he seems when he interacts with his family. When he tells his mother he doesn\u2019t love her (I.177-185), it hit me as the clearest sign that something inside him is gone. Not because he actually wants to hurt her, but because he genuinely can\u2019t access the feeling. That level of emotional numbness is terrifying to me. It shows how trauma can erase normal human responses, leaving someone almost emptied out.<\/p>\n

Another thing I noticed is how everyone around Krebs expects him to simply \u201cgo back\u201d to being the person he was before the war (II.165-167). His mother tries to force him into old routines, and his town clearly wants cheerful war stories. No one seems willing to accept that he has changed in ways he cannot go back on. This pressure to be \u201cnormal\u201d again made me think about how society often wants trauma survivors to heal quickly so it doesn\u2019t have to acknowledge their pain, Because healing is difficult, and society doesn’t want difficult soldiers. they want men who serve their country, and return afterwards with cheerful stories and smiles on their faces.<\/p>\n

In the end, even though I found the story quite depressing, it made an impact on me because of how disturbing Krebs\u2019 emotional silence is. He isn\u2019t dramatic or loud, but just very numb, I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What struck me most about Soldier\u2019s Home wasn\u2019t the plot at all, it was the emptiness surrounding Krebs. Hemingway writes Krebs and his life with such a flat, unemotional tone that I honestly found it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wwi-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17113"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17218,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17113\/revisions\/17218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/english10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}