Hemingway vs Krebs

Ernest Hemingway led an unconventional life filled with sadness and depression. He was one of the great American writers that found salvation in their writings. He managed to drive all his frustration into the books he wrote. And so thus we find many of his characters manifested with various similarities from his own life.

            Hemingway didn’t really live in a picture perfect family environment. He had a tuff mother that often neglected him and his needs and was unbearable. She mainly cared about her life more and this caused a huge gap between her and her son. Furthermore, his father was completely detached from the family; he was always at work, which left the mother to do her way around the house. We can clearly see the resemblance of his parents to Krebs parents in Soldier’s Home. The mother never showed attention to Krebs life in the war and constantly nagged for him to stop being lazy and start a new life. The father was “emotionally detached” but always seemed to have some sort of control over him. The fact that Krebs wasn’t allowed to use the car is very similar to Ernest not being able to have a library card. So he along with his character Krebs has built up emotional barriers where no one could find a way to their troubled and depressed mind. We can’t also forget the detachment he later with women. He simply stopped caring. The war is bound to change everyone. And it had a huge effect on Hemingway’s life, for that it made him to the worse. His time at war was not what he actually wanted for he didn’t really participate in the actions of it. Being an ambulance driver restricted him from fully indulging in the various happenings, and thus his stories to back home had little truth in them. This gave him a huge amount of guilt to suffer from therefore leading him to a state of complete depression. And this is exactly what we saw happening with Krebs.

            Ernest Hemingway suffered from an unconventional family life that undoubtedly left him emotionally scarred. His domineering mother and cowardice father left Hemingway with a less than perfect model of how to be a mentally strong and persevering man. In “Soldier’s Home” Hemingway brings his pain to life, to be forever immortalized in the character Harold Krebs.