Comparison of Soldier's Home and How to Tell a True War Story

Introduction

The purpose if this study is to expand the boundaries of knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures related to the comparison between Ernest Hemingway's “How to Tell a True War Story” and Tim O'Brian's “Soldier's Home”. There are a lot of similarities between the stories due to the fact that they both involve young men going to war and having to face the atrocities war. In "Soldier's Home", Krebs lies and embellishes so much that after his return home it makes him sick to lie. This theme is backed up by O'Brian's story when he says that in order to make a war story believable to the general population; one must lie and stretch the truth (Meyer, pp. 1-19). In the next section, the author will present critical points of comparison and contrast between the stories.

Discussion & Analysis

Soldier's Home

Originally published in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers in 1925, then reprinted in In Our Time that same year, "Soldier's Home" is a classic early Ernest Hemingway story for at least three reasons. First, the author powerfully evokes the post-World War I malaise experienced by many returning American veterans—and even by their peers who saw no combat, and portrayed by many of Hemingway's literary contemporaries, T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, or Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, for instance. This sense of malaise is notably conveyed, too, in Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Second, it demonstrates Hemingway's conscious attention to his craft, a craft influenced by Gertrude Stein during his Paris years—in terms of economical, tightly knit sentences. Third, Hemingway is clearly utilizing his "iceberg" technique in this story: Very little of Harold Krebs's feelings and motivations appear clearly above the surface of the text; instead they remain submerged ...