Abstract: While critics have acknowledged Ernest Hemingway’s lengthy historical research in the composition of his Great War fiction, few have recognized how the cartographic methods developed during the war influenced his themes and prose style. In “Soldier’s Home,” the pivotal story in his 1925 breakout collection In Our Time , the ex-Marine Harold Krebs returns from the war unable to find his civilian bearings until he consults maps of the battles in which he fought. Krebs’s mental reacclimatization specifically involves the cartographic process of “restitution,” whereby aerial photographs were stripped of their extraneous or obfuscating details and converted into maps showing only relevant images. In evolving from a tactical wartime procedure to a strategic postwar worldview, restitution ultimately shields Krebs from life details that would otherwise prove too emotionally hazardous to keep within his purview and helps guide him toward a future away from his familiar, yet oppressive, surroundings.
Aaron Shaheen (Sun,) studied this question.