3.

I read "Soldier's Home" by Earnest Hemingway and I found it to brilliant. The writing style easily captures the readers attention, while also not being underdeveloped. Hemingway describes very gracefully the sense that this young man, Harold, is more or less dead inside. He returns home from WWI years after the fact, and years after most of his fellow soldiers had come home. He receives no parade and no fanfare upon his return, and is instead expected to enter back into regular society. Harold seems to be deeply disturbed and disillusioned by the horrors he has witnessed in the war. Upon his return, he seems to have zero ambition and zero sex drive. His nature seems to have been corrupted by the atrocities that he has seen or maybe even committed.

His utter lack of interest in the All American activities of taking girls out in a nice car, loving his mother, and working in a good job suggests that his emotional troubles may go even deeper than just disillusionment, and may even be something of the nature of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He no longer sees the world as something to be excited about, and certainly not something that he wishes to be a part of. He sees the world through a lens of truth that interferes with the perfect image of American life that the people in his home town are trying to hoist upon him.