In Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," when Krebbs
arrives home so much later than the others soldiers of the town, his arrival becomes
anticlimactic. When he does feel like talking, there is no one to listen because the
people in his town "had heard too many atrocity sotries to be thrilled by actualities."
So Krebbs finds that he must sensationalize, he must lie. But, after he does so, he
acquires "a distate for everything that had happened to him in the war." His having to
lie to people in town has now sullied and mitigated the memories of "cool and clear"
actions he had done in the war, actions that were the right things to do when he could
have done something else. Now these actions are trivialized and have "lost their cool,
valuable quality."
The fabrications of what were very
existential experiences make Krebbs nauseated. When he does talk to a man who was a
real soldier, Krebbs falls into the mode of one soldier among others, who has
been "sickeningly frightened" all the time. Then, because he is no longer
genuine, Krebbs loses everything, even what was real. He is left to be only a
disillusioned man who can no longer relate to his family or to others. "It was not
worth the trouble" to even have a girl. So he just looks at them, for "the world they
were in was not the world he was in."
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