In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Dueling Wounds in “Soldier’s Home” The Relation of Textual Form, Narrative Argument, and Cultural Critique If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading. —Hemingway, interview by George Plimpton If you’re studying literature, the intentions of the writer have to be found in the work itself, and not in his life. Psychology is an interesting subject but hardly the main consideration for the teacher of English. —Flannery O’Connor, “The Teaching of Literature” In the previous chapter, I performed an exhaustive reading of a Hemingway story in order to support the validity of three claims: that careful attention to articulated technique is necessary for fully understanding a short story’s aesthetic and cultural dimensions; that the author is much more than merely a social construction through whom culture speaks without conscious human agency; and that the literary richness of a short story is closer to that of poetry than to most novels and will reward very close critical scrutiny. In this chapter, we will take a different tack and focus on how an examination of the formal properties of a short story can contribute in fruitful ways to scholarly debates about its meaning. In other words, by taking a story that has generated a great deal of biographical and cultural interpretation, and critical debate, and by explaining its textual form and methods of narrative argumentation, I hope to demonstrate how a craft analysis is essential to understanding a story’s larger cultural significance. Because it is both Hemingway’s only story about a First World War veteran ’s homecoming and a story that portrays a conflicted mother-son relationship , “Soldier’s Home” has been, along with “Big Two-Hearted River” and “Now I Lay Me,” a highly contested text in the debate between critics who, following Philip Young, locate war trauma at the heart of Hemingway ’s fiction and other critics who instead emphasize the author’s unhappy 90 How Craft Readings Contribute to Understanding Stories childhood (I have previously labeled these the “war-wound thesis” and the “childhood-wound thesis” respectively).1 One early “war-wound” critic, Frederick J. Hoffman, speaking of the “unreasonable wound” Hemingway suffered in 1918 and his consequent repetition compulsion, sees the story as the “sharpest portrait” in 1920s fiction of the returning veteran. “In the absence of any clearly defined reasons for having fought,” according to Hoffman, “the returned soldier felt hurt, ill at ease, uncertain of his future, ‘disenchanted.’” Like other veterans, Hemingway’s Harold Krebs is unable to “adjust to the life he had left” for the war; he no longer loves anyone and cannot “bring himself to enjoy or respect his family, his home.” And so he must go away.2 Although Young did not address “Soldier’s Home” in his book, in which his main interest was confined to stories about either Nick Adams or the “Hemingway code,” nevertheless his war-wound thesis has echoed endlessly in Hemingway scholarship. For example, Robert Penn Warren observes that the “battlefields of A Farewell to Arms” explain young Krebs, “who came back to a Middle-Western town to accept his own slow disintegration .” In accord with a conclusion drawn earlier by Sheridan Baker, Richard Hasbany states that Nick Adams’s trauma in “Big Two-Hearted River” can be better understood in light of Krebs’s wartime experiences. Leo Gurko declares that “Hemingway’s particularly bad case of postwar jitters was described with special delicacy and insight” in “Soldier’s Home.” Arthur Waldhorn sees Krebs as having been “shocked into psychic disorientation . . . by the demands of a society whose values” he rejects. Krebs’s “silence is a wordless metaphor expressing outrage against the chaos of the universe and the isolation of the individual.” Scott Donaldson contrasts Krebs’s world as formed by his wartime experiences with the world of his hometown, and concludes that his “world was full of unreasonable pain and unconscionable suffering and inexplicable violence.” James R. Mellow calls the story “a classic in the literature of alienation following World War I, a definition of a generation returned from the war, dissatisfied with the goals and values of American life.” And Joseph DeFalco asserts that Krebs’s war experiences have made him unable to accept the old norms: “Church, family, and society no longer command allegiance...

Share