Soldiers Home

Jennalee Wooldridge   Setting: kansas   Time: wwI   Place:   Social environment: home from war, alienated   What mood?: lonely   Setting:   Time: Vietnam war   Place:   Social environment:   What mood?: synical   Lies about war stories   Truth are contradictory/confusing   Lie to get people to listen to war stories   Both stories are not conventional plot structure   does not tell you a moral   no true war story   lie to keep people interested   war was good and   admired patterns of people, nothing complicated   we like things that look like simple patterns but in reality they are more complicated and we like them less.   Everything in life is a paradox   Krebs likes german girls but likes American girls too   One guy boasted how girls mean nothing, one boasted how girls mean everything   We want to generalize everything but we cant   Through the styles of modernism and postmodernism Hemingway’s “Soldier” and O’Brien’s “How to tell a war story” express similar ideas about people’s expectations about war, and what war is actually like. Both stories contrast complexity and simplicity, as well as truth and lies. An idea that both stories portray is that as humans we like to view things as homogeneous and genralizedpatterns, but in reality they are more complex than that. People want to hear war stories that are follow a certain format including a beginning, end, and moral lesson. In order for these stories to entertain people they must contain lies, but because in reality war is not that simple and is not based around morals. The beauty humans perceived in convention is exemplified by both Hemingway and O’Brianwhen they provide examples of homogeneous groups of people.   A third person omniscient narrator who describes the experience of a World War I soldier returning home to Oklahoma tells Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”. The soldier, Krebs contrasts from convention because he returns home after the majority of the soldiers have already been back. Due to these unconventional circumstances Krebs...