Analysis Of A Soldier's Home By Ernest Hemingway

A Soldier’s Home is a short story written by Earnest Hemingway and published in 1925. One of the most compelling features of the work is its brevity and omission. Lamb notes “The short story’s lack of space leads to prose that relies heavily on suggestiveness and implication, allowing the reader a greater role in bringing the narrative to life. (Lamb 2016). As a former journalist, Hemingway learned to write in concise style that put the maximum information into every word, to the point of omitting information that could be inferred or discovered. According to Earnest Hemingway:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (Rosen 2009, Hemingway 1964)

In the Soldier’s Home, Harold Krebs comes home a year later than most of his comrades from

Is this some lascivious desire on his part, or is she a refuge from responsibility, or personal shortcoming. We must guess. We know he can’t begin to see his father, yet we are never told why. Much is made over his father allowing him to use the car as if the car is a symbol of adulthood and freedom, but looking under the surface, the car is also a symbol of the father’s responsibility to his family as the car allows him to take care of his real estate business. We can assume that the father was an uncaring brute to his son, or surmise that he is merely a clueless, but well-meaning man of early 20th century America. A father that can’t understand his son is the obvious implication, but Hemingway leaves open another interpretation, that the son is so ashamed of himself that he can’t bear to see his father lest his father suspect his