Soldier's Home by Ernest Hemingway
Quick answer: Soldier's Home by Ernest Hemingway: summary with the ending, Harold Krebs back in Oklahoma, the lies about the war, his mother's prayer, and the craft of flat narration.
Harold Krebs comes home to Oklahoma in the summer of 1919, a year after the town's other men were welcomed back, and finds nobody wants to hear what happened at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St Mihiel or the Argonne. Soldier's Home appeared in In Our Time (1925).
It is the plainest account in American fiction of a veteran who cannot rejoin ordinary life, and it contains no combat at all, only its aftermath in a kitchen and on a porch.
The story in brief, ending included
Krebs joined the Marines from a Kansas Methodist college in 1917 and came back in 1919, too late for parades. Two photographs open the story, fraternity brothers in identical collars, then Krebs with a corporal and two German girls on the Rhine, everyone looking wrong in the frame. Because the town has heard enough atrocity stories, he must lie to be listened to, and the lying poisons his memory of the one time he did what was in him to do.
His sister Helen asks him to watch her play indoor baseball and to say she is his girl. His mother serves breakfast with a speech about God's kingdom and good jobs, then asks if he loves her. He says no. She cries; he says he did not mean it and kneels while she prays for him, unable to pray himself. He decides to go to Kansas City for a job so life will go smoothly, to skip the scene with his father, and to walk over and watch Helen play. There it stops.
The characters
A family of four.
Themes: the returned soldier and the town that wants a story
The exam readings are alienation, failed communication and the loss of authenticity: Krebs's real experience is destroyed not by the war but by having to lie about it. The consequence-free life he craves is the war's teaching; the town runs on courtship, jobs and church, all obligation.
The sharper point is the pattern of small lies. Krebs lies about the war to be heard, lies to his mother that he did not mean it, and plans to dodge his father rather than lie to him; the one honest exchange is Helen's. Honesty here is possible only with someone who asks nothing back.
The craft: repetition as a damaged mind
The flatness of the opening photographs becomes the method: short declaratives, the word liked repeated until it empties, the girls described as a pattern rather than as people. The turn sits at the breakfast table when Krebs answers truthfully, and the climax is the immediate retraction.
The technique to steal is narration that mimics numbness. Hemingway never says Krebs is damaged; the sentences circle and refuse to conclude, so the prose has his symptom. Judged against Writory's rubric, where Voice and Style is one of five scored parts, this is a story where sentence rhythm is the whole argument.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, cite the two photographs as the story's opening statement about not fitting the frame.
- Use the repeated word liked and the girls-as-pattern passage as evidence of numbness in the prose.
- Argue the breakfast scene as climax and retraction rather than resolution.
- Writers: let damage appear in sentence rhythm, not in a diagnosis.
- Give your protagonist one person who asks nothing of them, and measure the others against that.
Try it yourself
Write a story about someone returning to a household after a long absence they will not discuss. Give them one truthful sentence in the whole story, spoken to the person least able to hear it, and have them retract it within a paragraph. End with a small plan that is really an escape.
Questions
What is the theme of Soldier's Home?
The alienation of a returned soldier from a town built on obligation, courtship and belief. Krebs wants a life without consequences, and every conversation at home demands one.
Why does Soldier's Home end with the baseball game?
Watching Helen play is the one thing asked of Krebs that he can do without lying or committing. The ending is deliberately small: a plan to leave for Kansas City and an afternoon at a schoolyard.
Is Soldier's Home a Nick Adams story?
No. The protagonist is Harold Krebs, though the story sits in In Our Time beside the Nick Adams pieces and shares their concern with war's aftermath.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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