1.

Could you please consider what impact the First World War had on Harold Krebs in "Soldier's
Home"?

It is hard to say for sure what Harold Krebs was like before the war, as the author doesn’t
provide much information about it. The couple of things we know about him are that he went to
a religious school, was a member of a fraternity and probably was an ordinary young man.

After the war ends and Harold comes back home, he is an entirely different person. To my mind,
the most accurate description of all he feels is "a distaste for everything."

Krebs is not interested in going back to social life. The war has been over for some time and
people in his hometown move on with their lives. Krebs seems to be annoyed with it, especially
with the fact that no one is impressed by his was stories, even when he tries to make them more
dramatic by lying.

He didn’t lose interest in girls and enjoys looking at them, but when it comes to considering any
kind of relationship, he thinks that "they lived in such a complicated world of already defined
alliances and shifting feuds that he did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it." He
experienced so much at such a young age, that it made him reevaluate the conventional social
order. During the time he was away on his military service gaining a very traumatic experience,
the youth of his town were leading an ordinary life, which included settling into groups that
would require considerable effort for him to enter. "He did not want to get into the intrigue and
the politics" that would be necessary to become involved in the town's social scene. His
alienation from his family and peers is the result of the trauma he experienced abroad. Krebs
doubts that anyone who was not involved in the war can truly understand the damage it has done
to him, and the effort required to make anyone understand is more than he is willing to attempt.

Characteristically, Hemingway does not try to describe what Krebs has seen and done in Europe.
The reader can only infer the past from the present. This story is a good example of
Hemingway's well-known "iceberg principle." 

2. How does it change the way that Krebs thinks about language? Is what Krebs thinks about
language carried over into Hemingway's new (modernist) style? 

Hemingway's style is that of a journalist and a soldier: plain, tough, intimate without sounding
emotional, trustworthy, direct.  In a word, it is full of ethos, credibility.
Hemingway was distrustful of adjectives, false adornment of nouns.  He also rarely used
dialogue tags.  He wanted his nouns and conversation to stand out.

His fiction establishes realistic feel of the character’s thought process.  In "Soldier's Home,"
which starts in medias res, we feel empathy for the speaker, a member of the lost generation.
But, it is empathy on our terms: because of his bare bones narration, he does not play upon our
sympathies. Hemingway uses the following in the story: polysyndeton (lots of "and"), high
frequency words, monosyllabic words, articles, 1st person pronouns, action verbs, active
tense, simple sentences, short, choppy, compound sentences, , 1st Person (I –oriented), informal
(causal), male (macho), ethos (credibility), inductive reasoning, elliptical style (what...

3. Is Krebs a forerunner of Jake Barnes, another veteran of World War One, in "The Sun Also
Rises"? 

I think that the only thing that Jake and Harold have in common is that they were at war, the rest
is totally different. Jake was physically wounded and throughout the story, his physical wound is
positioned as the only thing that doesn’t allow him to be happy. He has an active social life, a
job, he enjoys the company of his friends, loves Paris as well as Spain. He is even able to fall in
love, though he can’t enjoy it (and it makes him miserable). In other words, the war took away
his happiness but didn’t take away the courage for life.

The case of Harold Krebs is very different. The damage that the war made to his mental health
took away interest in life at all, made him skeptical about most of the things that life has to offer.