A Soldiers Home Analysis

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A Young Soldier Is Tasked With Starting His New Life
In the story “A Soldier 's home”, by Ernest Hemingway, a young man named Harold Krebs finds himself disconnected from society and unmotivated to fulfill the requirements set for American youth. Krebs struggle with continuing his religious belief becomes a problem. When Krebs was asked to pray with his mother, Krebs realizes his struggle with religious belief has become one of his challenges with returning home. Kreb is struggling to consider himself Christian. Veterans experience atrocities that causes them to question how God could allow such cruelty to exist.
Krebs predicament with his religion is common among those exposed to life without a sense of safety and assurance. Seeing the carnage war produces can scramble a man’s sense of reality and illusion. Everyone comes out of war a different person. Philip K. Paulson, a veteran of the Vietnam War, went into Vietnam a Lutheran, and became an atheist after one month in Vietnam. Krebs, who came from a “Methodist college in …show more content…

Krebs had experienced his own traumatic experience during his service. When asked to pray with his mother, Krebs simply said “I can’t”. Krebs refusal to pray is a result of the traumatic experience he went through. The experience may have caused Krebs to question how God could allow such terrible events to happen. John Rawls, a political philosopher, said his experience of serving in World War II had caused him to question his faith. Rawls saw first hand the horrors of the Holocaust. The Holocaust made him question of “whether prayer was possible”. Rawls couldn 't understand how God could allow the Jews to be slaughtered, while he was allowed to live free. After returning home from the war, Krebs “felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it”. Krebs inability to consult about his experience denied him the answers he was looking for. Krebs resentment for God continued to grow as a result of being forced to keep quiet about the