“He was 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. Krebs becomes less communicative and settles into a simple routine. His father was non-committal” (Hemingway 134). She often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her attention always wandered. “His mother would have given him breakfast in bed if he had wanted it. When Krebs returns home, he realizes that most people, including his parents, do not want to listen to his war stories unless he lies about some details. In this way he lost everything” (Hemingway 134). Krebs “had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. He is no longer naive and enthusiastic the extreme negatively and sorrow he has experienced has made him apathetic and dishonest.
The later picture shows that the war has ruined Krebs’ subjective sense of morality. This illustrates a stark difference in Krebs, as he used to pay heed to his appearance and be passionate and optimistic about his life like other teenagers. In the second picture, he is with a corporal and two unattractive German girls, and his uniform seems too small for him. This indicates that he enjoyed strong bonds with his peers and felt a sense of belonging. The first picture shows Krebs with his “fraternity brothers” in college (Hemingway 133). In the beginning of “Soldier’s Home,” the author mentions two different pictures, the difference between them suggests that Krebs’ personality has irrevocably changed as a result of the war. For both Krebs and Seymour, wars have dehumanized them and let them become social outsiders and pathetic heroes who are not likely to escape from their emotional predicament and return into normal family lives. Still, they find it difficult to adjust to normalcy after all they have seen. In the short stories “Soldier’s Home” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the two protagonists’ lives after brutal wars explicitly demonstrate the idea that although they survived their battles, their fascination with war is no longer there. However, his claims do not seem true of many returning veterans found in literature. War is the strong life it is life in extremis war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us” (James 303). Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. In the article “History is a Bath of Blood,” William James writes that “modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.