In Our Time

The character's and dialogue portrayed in Ernest Hemingway's "In Our Time" are a perfect example of saying a lot by just saying a little. Hemingway is famous for this concise, to the point writing that leaves  certain stories ambiguous and for the reader to decipher the meaning. Basically every single vignette fell into this style along with, most poignantly, "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist." What these two stories, and more of the vignettes have in common, are that the narrator and/or main protagonist is unnamed and once again ambiguous which is sort of a running theme throughout this cycle. 

It would seem that the unnamed protagonist in "A Very Short Story" is Nick Adams, the main character in many of the other stories as he is a soldier returning from war back to Chicago where Nick is from. Then again, this character could be any number of soldiers who returned home from World War I to Chicago. Obviously Nick Adams was not the only young man from the Chicago area to fight in the war. The narrator of "The Revolutionist" is even more difficult to decipher. While there story (All one and a half pages of it) are written in first-person there is absolutely no internal monologue. The narrator is just observing what is going on, not stating his opinion or thoughts or emotions. The narrator is a character in the story, not some omnipresent force telling the events from on high. He's there in the action of what is going on, yet Hemingway has him merely reporting the events of this other man, this revolutionist. The unnamed narrator could again be Nick Adams, but in perfect Hemingway form it is impossible to know for sure. 

What Hemingway has done in many of these stories is created what one could call clones of Nick Adams and placed them in stories and situations that the "real" Adams would have gotten into as well. In most of the stories or vignettes where the narrator or main character is unnamed (save for the ones about the matadors) one could easily replace the "He" or "His" or "Him" with "Nick Adams" and the stories would not be any different. There is one story however that even though the main character is named with his own identity, he could easily b replaced with Nick Adams.

In "A Soldier's Home" Krebs is a young man who has returned from Europe following World War I. Krebs has seen terrible things and is noticeably shaken and still dealing with this past trauma. His anger is only more so fueled by this bitterness that rises in him when he does not receive any sort of hero's welcome when he returns home. It is explained that Krebs did not come immediately home following the war and people even "seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over." 

Krebs is an angry young man who has lied about war stories in order to talk to people. Even when he tried to make his war stories more exciting he received a negative reaction from people which just fueled his bitterness. He seems almost dead on the inside even telling his mother, "I don't love anybody," including her which prompts her to burst into tears. What is so striking about this story is that we never learn what exactly it was that Krebs saw in the war. It was obviously some sort of atrocity or traumatic event, but Hemingway never reveals any particulars. The fact is, we don't really even need to know what happened to Krebs. Hemingway is allowing us as the reader to create a war scenario in our head as to what happened to Krebs that made him so desensitized to the world. An interesting note is that Krebs could easily be Nick Adams. Along with the main character in the vignette that precedes this story. Either Krebs or Nick could be the solider who is trapped in a trench and in desperation calls out to God and promises to spread his world if he lives, yet when he does, never says a word about God to anybody. This could be the traumatic event that shaped Krebs life. This could be a traumatic event in Nick Adams live. This could also be a traumatic event in one of the millions of soldiers who fought in World War I. It doesn't matter who it is. This is the point I believe Hemingway is trying to make. All the soldiers, no matter where they are from, what their names or what they were like before the war, can sort of melt into the same figure following the war. People from different backgrounds are thrown into this horrific setting of death and destruction and come out as these stoic individuals shaped solely by the atrocities of war. All the soldiers are the same. The unnamed narrators, unnamed characters, Nick Adams or Krebs can all be the same person. The war makes people feel like that. It stripped people of their identity before the war.