Returning from war Seymour Glass is finding it hard to reintegrate himself into society and his life before the war. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” shows the intensity of the lives of soldiers returning to a world that does not know how to help them come to terms with the brutality of war. After being released from the hospital psychiatrists, being sent there unwillingly to begin with, Seymour’s wife, Muriel, and her family notice a few strange behaviours including the “business with the window,” and “the horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away.” (8) The psychiatrist says, “that Seymour may completely lose control of himself”, but Muriel takes Seymour on a trip. (9) His behaviour was getting …show more content…
(18) His mind is still in the war zone with “so many tigers” running around when there were only six. (21) Seymour then gets mad with Sybil because Sharon Lipschutz is not mean to small, little, dogs, but “Some little girls like to poke that little dog with balloon sticks” referring to Sybil. (21-22) The small little dog is a symbol of Seymour and how he has a narrow body and is smaller than the rest of the “New York advertising men in the hotel” (1)
Bananafish “swim into a hole where there is a lot of bananas . . . Can’t fit through the door. They are a symbol of how one “ordinary looking” person gets into a situation with lots of issues, but once they get there they are inappropriate and “behave like pigs.” They get so full of emotion and confusion they get “so fat” they cannot escape. While searching for Bananafish, Sybil found one, Seymour is the Bananafish she found. After finding and now understanding Seymour, he comes back to reality and asks Sybil if the one she found “has any bananas in his mouth” and for Seymour “six” is a lot of bananas to him. (24) With all his emotions bubbling to the surface, Seymour carelessly and angrily “jammed his towel into his pocket” and started back to the hotel room. (25) Sybil teaches him that he has emotions and he is stuck and cannot move like a Bananafish. In the elevator a woman stares at his feet, which makes Seymour angry because he does not like to be noticed which provokes him into arguing
I was never a huge fan of children. I was never the girl to babysit all of the kids on my block. I was never the girl to spark up a conversation with a little girl or boy. I am the younger sibling and I have no younger cousins; I was the baby of the family, so I never really had to deal with children growing up. I never know what to say when I am talking to children because they do not understand the world the same way I do. Up until now, I never thought of that as a good thing. Seymour, a character from A Perfect Day for a Bananafish, is in a similar situation after returning from war with a severe case of PTSD. He talks to the children because they do not understand all of the tragedies of the world. Seymour has an easier time communicating
No one can ever understand a soldier’s experience as they return home from war. On the battle field, they experience tremendous loss. They have returned from a terrible situation and often have difficulties reintegrating into society. Ordinary situations can be a challenge, and family members cannot understand what soldiers have endured. In the short story, “Soldier’s Home”, by Ernest Hemingway, a young man, Krebs, has returned home from war. He returned home to Oklahoma and looks for a simple life. He avoids talking about the war, but the war changed him to be distant and outcast. In, “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway, the events of the war have caused Krebs to distance himself from society. He has distanced
Ernest Hemingway “Soldier’s Home" is an outstanding short story that shows the tragic impact of war on the life of a young soldier who returns home. The story paints a vibrant picture of a soldier’s life after coming back from a shocking experience. Hemingway shows impacts of war on a soldier with the main character being Harold Krebs, who faces hostility in his hometown after his return from fighting in the war. The main character in the story is Kreb with the author making usage of repetition, characterization, and symbolism to bring out the message in the story.
“Soldier’s Home” is a story by Ernest Hemingway that symbolizes how a World War 1 veteran is faced with many difficulties when transitioning into society after war. Real life finds its way into Hemingway’s writing often mirroring some of his own challenges giving the reader a sense of familiarity. Most notably, Hemingway’s description of getting used to a life without the backdrop of war in “Soldier’s Home” shows credibility, most likely from his own experience of returning home from the battlefield.
It’s a beautiful day at the beach, the sun is shining down on you as you float and drift on top of the waves. As you lay there without a care in the world, you are suddenly interrupted by a massive swarm of jellyfish; also known as a bloom. Not only does this send you into sudden terror, it also causes a much bigger threat to the ecosystem below you. The excessive growth of jellyfish swarm drastically lowers the population of fish eggs in the ecosystem. Because of this, fishermen lose millions of dollars. People in local communities are figuring out ways to solve this mass production.
The first example is to show the development of their emotions from a happy-go-lucky state to a subdued one, “A kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission”(376). The shift in emotion was caused by the war; its unrecognizable effects are very difficult for one to understand unless they have experienced it for themselves. This first change in sentiment towards the war is the loss of interest due to the fact that the soldiers felt that their efforts were futile, a parallel to Lieutenant Cross’s situation with his long-distance relationship with Martha. As he realizes that she does not actually love him back, he becomes disinterested and resistant to loving her. The decay of the Lieutenant’s love for Martha is a direct correlation to their experience during the war. The next change is the formation of irrational thoghts. The soldiers, at one point, believe that the best option for them is to actually handicap themselves in attempt to escape the war: “So easy: squeeze the trigger and blow away a toe. They imagined it. They imagined the quick, sweet pain, then the evacuation to Japan, then a hospital with warm
Muriel, Seymour’s wife, and her parents, are representing the kind of America the soldiers in World War II return to. They are unaware of what exactly has taken place and what kinds of unexplainable cruelties these soldiers have experienced. On top of that, Muriel and her mother seem very self-centered and extremely shallow, which doesn’t make it any better for Seymour to return to, even though they seem to show great concern for him and his kind of behavior. For example, we are being told about Muriel that “she was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.”
The returning of a dramatic event disables a soldier to adapt accordingly to everyday life. Ones conscious of reality is infringed upon Posttraumatic experiences of warfare, which unleashes an outbreak of inhumane actions directed towards existence and significant others. As the short story progresses after the event of the Vietnam War, the narrator says referring to Henry that:
This is an essay on the short story “Soldier’s Home” by Hemingway. Will the life of a soldier ever be the same after returning from war? Many generations of young adults have gone from their homes with tranquil settings to experience war and come home to a different world. Many have witnessed the devastations and atrocities that occur with war. Harold Krebs, a young man from a small town with a loving family is no different from those before him and those to follow. The anguish of what war is however cannot dispel the thoughts and memories of what many young men come home to face in the real world. Many have trouble coping in the new world known as home.
I saw myself holding an AK-47 and walking through a coffee farm with a squad that consisted of many boys and a few adults.¨ Beah explains while recalling a nightmare he had in which he was back in the war although he had been living in New York City for months. This is the first time Beah’s PTSD is displayed in this book, and just one of the many examples he gives us of how the war has had long-term effects on his mental
As a young man coming back from the war, Krebs expected things to be the same when he got home and they were, except one. Sure the town looked older and all the girls had matured into beautiful women, Krebs had never expected that he would be the one to change. The horrific experiences of the first World War had alienated and removed those he had cared about, including his family, who stood naïve to the realities and consequences only those who live it first hand would comprehend.
When men are sent to war most fear that they’ll never return home but both Tayo in Silko’s Ceremony and Frank Money in Toni Morrison’s Home found their sense of home in the status of the uniforms they wore and orders they followed. Though these character’s appear to exhibit the lasting wound of post traumatic stress disorder in their daily lives after the war and are struggling to cope with there identity as a minority in America without the respect of being a soldier. The continuing effects caused by the traumatic experience of war allows for both Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison to use it to their advantage in narrating the story of these characters by their style of writing and what the characters recall or what they can or cannot remember.
For many veterans returning home from their service in the military, their first struggle they encounter is usually the emotional stress they carry from their experiences at war. In the early 1900’s the difficulties these returning soldiers possessed were not being recognized as something family, friends, and doctors needed to worry about. Although all soldiers share different stories about their hardships, most veterans could agree that it was tough to settle back into their previous home as quick as their hometown expected them to. Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” and Saunders “Home” both tell a story of a veteran returning home from war and describes how the character reacted to coming back home.
“The Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway is a short story that tells the story of a soldier who returns home but realizes that war has changed his life. Hemingway ensures that the readers fully understand the purpose of the short story by using a detached tone, brief sentence structure, and a lack of imagery help develop the short story. The use of these literary techniques in Hemingway’s story allows him to develop his plot without losing his audience’s attention and include a message in the story. The story is told in third-person which allows for the reader to have a clear image of the soldier Krebs and his return home.
Although it provides an important perspective into the lives of post war veterans, Hemingway’s novel is merely a fictional story and the events that occur in the book are not representative of any real life occurrences. Hemingway is able to accurately able to depict the shift of morale views that occurred after the war. People went from emotional and restrained and god fearing, to liberated, materialistic, and pessimistic. Following the First World War, Veterans lost a belief in objective morality and correspondingly lost the belief in love and capacity to make deep connections with people. The characters within this novel face social and personal problems, whether it be physical ailments or mental disabilities, both of which impede their lives completely. Hemingway’s ability to capture and and present the overwhelming emotions that encompassed the Lost Generation is what makes his novel effective and historically