The Man He Killed By Thomas Hardy

“He felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed… Perhaps he had been in his own company before the split in the army.” “Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face.” From these quotes we can experience the horror the unnamed sniper feels as he realizes that not only has he killed a man but he has murdered his own brother. The feeling twisted in his heart, sorrow, solemn and regrets.

“Wars never hurt anybody except for the people who died” -Salvador Dali, leader of the Surrealist Movement. In both stories men who are at war are described, both of these men have killed a man who are known as their foes. Both of the men realize that the man they killed could've been a friend, and were someone who really wasn't the enemy. The relationship between these two stories is that war can tear families apart. In Liam O'Flaherty's “The Sniper” and “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy both show similarities and differences in plot, irony, and theme.

Though the men reacted in violent ways in different situations, O’Brian’s violent act was something that stayed with him for the rest of his life and completely changed who he was as a person. “The Man I Killed” describes in detail the man and his life Tim O’Brien killed on a path in the jungle, even though he obviously did not know the man’s personal background, but mimicked it after his own. This description shows O’Brien’s life came to an end at his first act of violence, mirrored in the loss of the man’s life. After O’Brien’s incident on the pathway, he became cold and exemplified this new disposition after Jorgenson almost allowed O’Brien to die from a bullet wound, and in turn O’Brien needed pay back by scaring him in the middle of the night. The war may have physically killed many, but in this sense it damaged every soldier mentally.

It wasn’t until he went to war and was faced with the enemy that he would realize that the enemy wasn’t so different after all.

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell is able to accomplish so many thing with so little lines-mainly through the use of metaphor and diction. It explains the terrors of wars in gruesome detail and explains the ways in which wars, in a sense “breed” and “birth” death. To some, this poem is seen as the ultimate poem of war, and rightly

During the Vietnam War, American soldiers that did not directly kill another human being still felt to surge of guilt by being a part of the force that killed innocents. In particular, Tim O’Brien never killed a soul during war, nor did he ever look at the faces of the dead. However, O’Brien dedicates multiple chapters to the man he “killed.” The man is described in the saying, “He was not a fighter. His

In many works of American literature, protagonists attempt to forge an authentic identity for him in spite of social expectations and circumstances. Some of the struggles that happen in the novel “The Things They Carried” was that the author was describing the lives and deaths of his company. The men include Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders, Dave Jensen, Lt. Jimmy Cross, Lee Strunk, Rat Kiley, Curt Lemon, Henry Dobbins, Azar, and Eddie Diamond. Rat Kiley is a very good friend to Tim, and he writes about how they've learned to tell war stories. One of the ways in which he explains it was in this line "How do you generalize?

In this passage O’brien demonstrates his own character traits. As a writer, he has a strong ability to understand what others are feeling and sympathize. When he kills the young soldier, he creates a story around him, imaging the soldier as having similar struggles to his own. He deeply regrets the soldier's death because he feels that neither of them really wanted to be fighting in this war and relates his own life story to the fictional one he creates for the soldier.

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

The man he killed was written at the time of the Boer war. This poem has some controversy with the setting in which it was written because it does not specifically refer to the Boer war but it could refer to any war. The poem was a conversation between the killer and the killed. He remarks about how much he and the victim had so much in common and how petty of a reason they had to kill each other.

‘The Man He Killed’ was written in the nineteenth century during the Boer War that took place in South Africa in 1898. This war was because the British Empire wanted to take control over the land because of its rich gold and diamonds. The poem is written in a conversational tone, with speech marks, making us feel that the soldier is talking directly to us reminiscing about killing a “foe” whilst at war. The speaker in this poem is a man of low class who was unemployed and had already sold all his possessions and consequently had no choice but to join the army; this can be seen when the man states “just as I- was out of work-had sold his traps”. Hardy is showing us that some people join the army just out of desperation not because they believe in the political side of war. These unemployed, low classed people have no other way of earning the money to help them survive so they turn to the only other option the have- joining the army. The speaker is forced to kill another man which he claims was his ‘foe’ and later on realises that he and the man had a lot in common.

War is a subject that often stirs upon many emotions with those directly or indirectly involved. It may bring tears, memories of suffering and loneliness, struggles, or victories. Such disturbance of peace has wounded and killed many souls. It is on the battlefield we see the most hideous side of human nature, for every soldier's only objective on the battlefield is to survive and win. Many people have opposing views about wars which may have been developed over time based on many factors such as family upbringing, culture, political views, or personal experiences. In the two poems studied, Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est" and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", war has been described with completely opposing

The pains, the anguish, I cannot contain this guilt for much longer. I must confess the most horrific sin committed. Fortunado is dead, but his soul continues to mock me from the grave. He haunts my mind and disturbs my rest. I fear soon I will be consumed in guilt . Make haste, and listen to my story. Relive me from my unceasing burden. I had borne thousands of injuries , but the insult that ignited my desire for Fortunado's extermination is when he "accidentally" killed my only son and sole heir of the Montresor family. He tried to prove his innocence with his counterfeit honeyed half-truths, but I was there on the day Giovanni was ruthlessly incinerated at the mercy of Fortunado. My faithful spies inconspicuously hid me in an empty

Though the war and “all its deeds of carnage, must in time be / utterly lost” (2), in this present moment, “a man as divine as [oneself] is dead” (6), “white faced and still”(7), washed of his sins by “the hands of the sisters Death and Night” (4) along with the rest of “this soil’d world”. Whitman presents one with this image of hopelessness, the world is in such bad shape that only death can cure it. So much of the story is left ambiguous; nowhere does Whitman tell us what war he is referring to, why he considers this man his enemy, or the cause of his enemy’s death. This lack of detail is so profound that one could barely consider Reconciliation a story, but rather a moment frozen for all time in poetry. Such is Whitman’s talent in writing. Though he conforms to no ideas of what poetry should be, a revolutionary idea for his time, and presents the reader with no rhyme scheme, no particular meter, and in some ways a complete lack of order in his poetry, he manages to convey an image of a dead man being “touched lightly with [the] lips” (9) of his enemy in a way that seems almost sacred in only ten lines. The reader will never know how he died or what he died for, but it matters little. The only thing that matters is that one moment of beauty amongst a world of chaos and

In this essay I will be comparing the two poems, ‘The Man He Killed’ by Thomas Hardy and ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen. ‘The Man He Killed’ is about a man who was in the war and is thinking about his memories in the war. The main part of his experience in the war that he is reminiscing is the killing that he committed and the majority of the poem is focused on that. Thomas Hardy did not go to war himself but it could be thought that he got the idea from a friends experience in the war. The poem is based on the Boer War. The message of the poem is that he was most probably very similar to the man he killed, as in not really knowing what they’re fighting for and why they’re there. ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ is about someone who is