Hemingway vs "Soldier's Home"

When I first read "soldier's home", I got a bit depressed. I found the story to be sad and unavoidably painful; not your everyday treat. How can it be when it revolves around the despair of a soldier, once back home, lost and inevitably bruised finds himself to be an ugly duckling.

As I read about Hemingway, I could understand where the story is coming from. In "soldier's home", krebs was a conformist young lad. Eager to become a man, he enlisted himself in the Marines in 1917. What is interesting about this particular date in the story is that, that same year Hemingway himself got rejected for military service because of a defected eye, but still managed to get enrolled as an ambulance driver for the red cross, putting him in the foreground of world war I. Here we can relate Krebs to Hemingway in character, both wanting to prove themselves at a young age, both wanting to be worthy of their uniform.

While in service, Hemingway was injured in 1918 and was hospitalized. During recovery he met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse. However Agnes did not share that love and rejected Hemingway's marriage proposal, leaving him heartbroken and alone. In the story, Krebs showed hesitance and fear of consequences when it came to "girls in town". It said that krebs liked to watch the girls and that he would like to have a girl, but didn't want the trouble of courting or the politics, "it wasn't worth it" he said. It is as if Hemingway was expressing his frustration of his own experience - Agnes - through Krebs.  He didn't want Krebs to have to go through the consequence, that of a broken heart. "it wasn't worth it".

 

On another note, a few months after Hemingway went back home, he received a letter from Agnes explaining her disapproval. It was the fact that see saw him as a "kid", she expressed her regret of misleading him from the start, she found him "aimless" and a "spoiled child". Which also underlines the previously mentioned frustration Hemingway must have felt, and has expressed through the character of Krebs.

One can say that the story "Soldier's Home" is in fact to some extent an autobiography, or at least a fragment of it. For it is closely linked to Hemingway's personal life and experiences, it is almost as if Hemingway embodied his own values in the main character, those of fervor, courage and endurance.