The Man He Killed Analysis

Killing a foe in war stirs up many emotions for the killer. In the text “The Man I Killed” by Tim O’Brien and the poem “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy both depict ways that a soldier reacts to taking another person’s life. They describe the incidents in similar but different ways. While both O’Brien and Hardy both put themselves into the dead man's place, only O’Brien uses more imagery than Hardy. The story and the poem are similar in the way the narrator compares the dead body to themselves. Tim, the main character in “The Man I Killed,” put himself into the body of the man he killed. “Frail-looking, delicately boned, the young man would not have wanted to be a soldier and in his heart would have feared performing badly in battle”

The story, “The Man I Killed” had more intense imagery than the poem “The Man He Killed”. The opening lines of the story are the tell tale sign of the intenseness of the imagery: “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, and his other eye was a star shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien 1 ). The author is trying to put you in his place so you could see what he saw. The extent of Hardy’s imagery was: “And staring face to face…/ I shot him dead” (Hardy 6 and 9). In the poem Hardy doesn't include much imagery because he gets his point across in a different way. O’Brien wanted the reader to feel as if he was there standing over the body and the feelings it caused so he portrayed this through strong imagery, which wasn’t uncommon in O’Brien’s writing. Hardy used word choice and tone to portray his feeling after killing a