Examples Of Temptations In Soldier's Home

The Temptation of Harold Krebs In the short story “Soldier’s Home”, Ernest Hemingway talks about how a man named Harold Krebs comes home from a war in Germany to his hometown in Oklahoma, only to deal with the struggles of war trauma. One theme illustrated throughout the passage is the theme of temptation. Krebs has a temptation to lie to the people around him, a temptation to isolate himself from other people, a temptation to sloth around and do nothing for himself. This all seems to stem from war trauma from the experiences that Krebs had to deal with while he was in Germany. While it is not outright stated that his war trauma is the cause, there is significant evidence that suggests that this was the reason. One of the

An example of Krebs doing this is when he starts using his free time to do activities that involve being alone, such as “Sleeping late in bed, getting up to walk down town to the library to get a book, eating lunch at home, reading on the front porch until he became bored and then walking down through the town to spend the hottest hours of the day in the cool dark of the pool room.” (Hemingway 70) Almost all of these activities suggest that he spends most of his free time alone, trying to stay away from human interaction. This isolation can infer that Krebs wasn’t trying to lie to anyone else and to do that he had to leave everyone alone. Another example of this isolation is when Krebs realizes that he doesn’t want to talk to any of the girls back home because they aren’t as “easy” as the girls in Germany. To go further, the girls that Krebs would get in Germany didn’t talk much due to there being a language barrier, and nothing serious ever had to come out of the relations he had with these women. Since Krebs was home to talk to a girl, he had to get into a conversation, which was too much work for him. To put it shortly, “He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her.” (Hemingway 71) Since this was the case, Krebs always just sat back on his front porch and watched the girls walk by, as he did nothing but watch