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How Krebs Changes

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social connections or relationships, and he even states he does not want the trouble of having a girlfriend (Hemingway 2). Krebs is in a kind of lifeless state in the town, where it seems that he merely wanders around like a ghost, without much affect on, or interest in, the things happening around him. He is essentially dead on a social level, due to his ability to function as the other people around him and relate to their different set of concerns. The most effective way of demonstrating this change within Krebs is by the contrast he forms to the other characters in the story. His changes are contrasted with the town, where the people and placed have not changed. For example, he gives very succinct one line responses to his other family members, and does not seem to show any emotion or care when his mother starts crying (Hemingway 6-7). He also gets “sick and vaguely nauseated” when …show more content…

In “Solder’s Home,” the story begins as Krebs returns home, yet we do not get much of a glimpse into the specific events of the war that had changed him. We know that he returned alive, and he does not seem to have any significant physical injuries that are mentioned. This may be a consequence of the fact that he was a late arrival to the war, and many of those most devastating battles were already over. In Poe’s poem, we are only given two lines that say “evil things, in robes of sorrow, assailed the monarch’s high estate” (lines 33-34). No further context is given to let the reader determine whether this was literally some kind of supernatural force, or just an allusion to the passage of time or some tragic event. The actual cause of the change remains a mystery. The technique of not describing such events to the reader may be a way of forcing them to focus on the state of the characters after their transformation, rather than the events that actually caused these changes as a key point in the

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