Extra Credit Hemingway #11

When I turned eighteen I moved away from my family to go to college out of state. It was the first time I started living on my own and away from home. It was an exciting time for me, having my own car, job, apartment and being self-sufficient. The experience was great I learned a lot about life and started seeing it in a new light. After two years I flew back to visit my family and the house I grew up in. To my shock everything was different. Not just the fact that my old room looked smaller but the people I knew and grew up with changed. My family was the exception, they all stayed the same, I think it was because we emailed a lot and talked on the phone. My friends however were all different, with different personalities. Weather it was from growing up or being away from them for so long, or maybe a combination of the two. Reading Hemingway’s story made me reflect on my own personal experience and understand how Krebs was feeling. The longer the separation the more people change. It’s bound to happen, what is unfortunate is the fact that Krebs was away for a very important reason, to protect the ones he knew and cared for. When I consider how he must have felt when those same people he was fighting for neglected him or worse despised him for the very thing laid his life on the line. It generates anger in me knowing there are people like that. Hemingway does a great job of arousing those feelings and even if someone had no experienced isolation the story would still create a similar effect.