Enemies and allies, foes and friends; they are both so different, yet so similar. Then again, how can one be an enemy, if the other doesn’t know who or what they're fighting against. In Thomas Hardy’s poem, “The Man He Killed” and in Tim O’Brien’s story “The Man I Killed”, both authors portray the reactions and realizations of a soldier after he kills another man, while fighting in war. Both authors describe how the dead enemy could’ve easily been the soldier instead and they saw their lives being the dead soldier’s instead. However, while O’Brien’s character killed the other man in order to survive, Hardy’s speaker did not know why he killed the other. While war maybe a conflict regarding two opposing sides, killing another person, with or without a worthy justification, has a large impact on the person’s thoughts of mortality. …show more content…
As to why the soldiers did this, it was due to the realization of the dead man and how it could’ve easily been them. As Hardy wrote, “He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,/ Off-hand like- just as I-/ Was out of work” (Hardy 13-16) and just as O’Brien stated, “He often wanted to, but he was afraid , and this increased his shame” (O’Brien paragraph 4); both characters couldn’t have received information about the man they killed because he was a man with no name. This leaves the readers to infer the men are using their own lives and putting themselves in the dead man’s place. Meanwhile, while soldiers sometimes are cornered with the choice to kill a man or not, they do not always have the same reasons as to
G.K.Chesterton once quoted, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” The novel Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, recounts the struggles of a Canadian soldier through his tedious and terrible experiences fighting for his country against the Germans. Throughout the novel, the protagonist was disgusted by the blood and trauma war brings, however, he knew that it was imperative to kill, or else he would not have survived. In war, it is kill or be killed, someone who is wise will kill to survive and protect his country, as well as avenge his family or comrades.
These men are transformed into guilt-laden soldiers in less than a day, as they all grapple for a way to come to terms with the pain of losing a comrade. In an isolated situation, removed from the stressors, anxieties, and uncertainties of war, perhaps they may have come to a more rational conclusion as to who is deserving of blame. But tragically, they cannot come to forgive themselves for something for which they are not even guilty. As Norman Bowker so insightfully put it prior to his unfortunate demise, war is “Nobody’s fault, everybody’s” (197).
Murder is a reprobate action that is an inevitable part of war. It forces humans into immoral acts, which can manifest in the forms such as shooting or close combat. The life of a soldier is ultimately decided from the killer, whether or not he follows through with his actions. In the short stories The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty and Just Lather, That's All by Hernando Téllez, the killer must decide the fate of their victims under circumstantial constraints. The two story explore the difference between killing at a close proximity compared to killing at a distance, and how they affect the killer's final decision.
It is inevitable when dealing regularly with a subject as brutal as war, that death will occur. Death brings grief for the victim’s loved ones, which William Faulkner depicts accurately and fairly in many of his works, including the short story “Shall Not Perish” and The Unvanquished. While the works differ because of the time (The Unvanquished deals with the Civil War while “Shall Not Perish” takes place during World War II) and the loved ones grieving (The Unvanquished shows the grief of a lover and “Shall Not Perish” shows the grief of families), the pain they all feel is the same.
After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taking place in the psyche of the narrator is directly repressed by the war.
Since these soldier are of such a young age the emotions and burdens are highly intensified. The men that were drafted for Vietnam were in their late teens to early twenties. They had absolutely no concept of killing. These young men were students or boyfriends, they had no idea how to handle the loss of a fellow soldier who they have forged a friendship with. The author Tim O'Brien uses details to point out what the experience was like for these young men. To illustrate the fear and cowardice that none of them could admit to. This is something that all of the soldiers had to deal with. Even though they were scared to go out and fight they did so anyway because, it was hard for these men to face the burden of emotion. When Ted Lavender died his fellow soldiers were indeed sad for his loss but, every single one of them was happy that it wasn't them who was dead. They can still live one more day deal...
As an author, his job is not to tell what happened, but to tell the story where the reader feels what he felt going through the villages in Vietnam and fighting on the front lines. For those who never went to war, the feeling of hiding and almost being blown into pieces does not exist in their minds. They will never share the share experiences that Tim O'Brien went through as he served his draft. With each story, Tim O’Brien expresses a certain feeling. In the story, “The Man I Killed”, although the events never occurred, the reader does not know it at the time. He imagines the life story of the young man. The young man is not a communist nor a fighter. He pictured the boy's life, that he loved to learn and avoided the politics. "He [the boy] imaged covering his head and lying in a deep hole and not moving until the war was...
In both “The Sniper” and “The Man He Killed” a person dies from a gunshot wound. Both persons had gotten shot because they were the enemy. Each selection is ironic in some way because in the story “The Sniper” the man thinks he shot the enemy but soon he starts growing curious about who he shot, when he gets a closer a look at the person he shot it was his brother. In the poem “The Man He Killed” the soldier towards the end of the poem implies that if it was not for war soldiers and the enemies would get along. Both selections say that war is horrible due to the many
If someone were to ask people who Frankenstein is they would probably describe a tall, hideous monster with bolts sticking out of its neck. But long before movies reinvented their version of the monster, there was a novel by Mary Shelley entitled Frankenstein. In her novel, the monster is shown as child-like and uneducated. But what really makes someone a monster? Who is the true monster of Mary Shelley’s novel? Victor and the Creature present similarities and differences in their action and character throughout the novel.
In the novel, The Things They Carried, the chapter The Man I Killed tells the story of a main character Tim who killed a Viet Cong solider during the Vietnam War. The author Tim O’Brien, describes himself as feeling instantaneously remorseful and dealing with a sense of guilt. O’Brien continues to use various techniques, such as point of view, repetition, and setting, to delineate the abundant amount of guilt and remorse Tim is feeling.
Thus, in "Guests of the Nation," Frank O'Connor uses irony to illustrate the conflict that soldiers feel when they recognize the humanity of their enemies and yet they are compelled to kill them. O'Connor suggests the soul destroying impact of the conflict in his final words: "And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again" (598).
This is because of the fear in oneself. War imposes a lot of fear, and anyone would become protective of oneself if their life was in the line. In this circumstance, much of individual morality is lost, and one becomes part of a crowd. The soldier was just a member of something grand. A force so powerful, that it is able to erase individual morality for the sake of security.
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
Earnest Hemmingway once said "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." (Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference) War is a gruesome and tragic thing and affects people differently. Both Vonnegut and Hemmingway discus this idea in their novels A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse Five. Both of the novels deal not only with war stories but other genres, be it a science fiction story in Vonnegut’s case or a love story in Hemingway’s. Despite all the similarities there are also very big differences in the depiction of war and the way the two characters cope with their shocking and different experiences. It is the way someone deals with these tragedies that is the true story. This essay will evaluate how the main characters in both novels deal with their experiences in different ways.
...ar, O’Brien was able to turn his pain into a life purpose by immortalizing his loved ones. On the other hand, Bowker was not able to cope and resorted to taking his own life. In high-pressure environments such as war, instinct is the dominating force behind one’s actions. It is something inherent and extremely difficult to change for it corresponds with the person’s deepest desires. Therefore, instinctive reactions are accurate portrayals of a person’s inner identity and character. The cases of Bowker and O’Brien prove that it is the discovery of oneself during war, and not war itself, that has a profound impact on the human spirit.