A short post to announce a new podcast episode on Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” my longest one yet, running nearly an hour. I also recorded a piece by Leo Brouwer on my classical guitar, “Un Día de Noviembre,” as background music! Here is the opening paragraph:
With “Soldier’s Home,” Hemingway gives us a provocative and chilling look at Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome—PTSD— (what was then referred to as being “shell-shocked”), and I would argue it’s one of the most nuanced explorations of this condition ever portrayed in literature. The young man, Krebs, who has returned late from WWI to an unnamed town in Oklahoma is utterly overwhelmed psychologically, paralyzed into inaction. He finds himself well beyond the scope of reason/rationality to be of any assistance. Unlike the woman who screams out in the immediate pain of child birth in “Indian Camp,” Krebs’s pain runs psychically deep, though outwardly he appears healthy and normal. “Soldier’s Home” provides a story we can learn a lot from to this day—about the stigma of mental illnesses and how both those suffering from mental illness and their loved ones all too often lack the mechanisms and facilities to contend with them adequately on their own. Even as it provides a deeply perceptive look at PTSD (certainly gleaned from Hemingway’s own experiences in WWI), it also extends and deepens a range of themes at play in the collection. But take some time now to read or re-read Ernest Hemingway’s short story, again from In Our Time, “A Soldier’s Home.”
Find the episode HERE
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