Are you feelin it now, Mr. Krebs?

As most of you know, I was one of the people in charge of leading the group discussion on a few of the stories in Hemingway’s In Our Time, one of them being “A Soldier’s Home.” We explored a lot about Krebs, but I have some further things I’d like to discuss.

One of the first questions I had was why did Krebs come back later than everyone else? In the story it says that, “The men who had been drafted had all been welcomed elaborately on their return.” That makes it seem to me that Krebs chose to go to war -- all men who had been drafted being separate from him. Maybe he decided to go to get away from his mother that treated him like a child and a father who is presented as sort of this ominous figure. Maybe he heard promises of heroism.

Maybe Krebs is telling all these lies to try to justify and feel like going to war was the right choice for him. He just desperately wants people to see him as a hero, and to achieve that he tells people these lies to try to get that response (because his experiences in war weren't so thrilling for the average listener), but he just feels guilty later because he didn't actually do those things and he might not be the hero everyone thought he was. Not being seen as a hero and his town being the same once he came back seems to disappoint Krebs, making all these questions weigh heavy on his mind. He seems to let the war define his life, and can’t move past it.

Also, when the narrator was talking about Krebs reading about the war and understanding it more, he mentions that Krebs thinks finally that he had been a good soldier. Maybe Krebs constantly questioning if he was a good soldier can contribute to his need to try to validate himself going to war by lying. I think all of these worries contribute to the depressed vibe of Krebs that I get -- a Krebs that isn’t really feeling up to everyday life once he gets back.

Reflections on "The Things They Carried" & "Fire and Forget"

I find it interesting that after reading these two war books that are marked as fiction, I’m more inclined to want to believe that things actually happened in The Things They Carried more than in Fire and Forget. I sorta took for granted that in Fire and Forget, all the characters in the stories were fictional. I just assumed that the character’s life was entirely constructed by a writer who knew enough about the war through experience to think of a story that was plausible. In The Things They Carried, O’Brian talks about his life writing these stories, which brings us out of this fictional world, and makes us question it in a way that Fire and Forget never did, with each story being written by a different author and having no plot connection to each other. Now that I’m reading through The Things They Carried, I’m starting to wonder how much of Fire and Forget could be based on actual happenings to the writers.

Tim O’Brien succeeds in making us want to believe that these characters actually experienced these things in war in real life. Fire and Forget lets us believe that these sort of things happened in war instead of these events actually happening. Tim O’Brian succeeds in making us feel, and then takes away the sliver of what we believed was the truth, knowing that the feeling and reaction we got from the story is permanent. For me, I feel like having one steady narrator through most of The Things They Carried is driving home what war is actually like more than the individuals in Fire and Forget did. It is almost that through the connected plots, we’re able to connect to O’Brian more and therefore are more willing to try to feel what he felt in depth and share those feelings his character had at the time in the book. I felt that in Fire and Forget I was mostly feeling sympathy, while The Things They Carried made me feel sad, angry, and lots more.