Feutility Of War In Thomas Hardy's The Man He Killed

In the poem, “The Man He Killed,” by Thomas Hardy, he illustrates the theme of inhumanity and disgust that is consequential of war, by comparing two men, who could be grown together and are now fighting against each other for someone else’s cause. Feelings towards other people can also take a negative or positive role in real life whether it is a war or a normal life crime; people hurt each other in the way that can cause them to make a certain decision. Throughout the poem, Hardy uses the techniques of tone and word choice to get his ideas across the poem and focuses on the senselessness and futility of war, where a man has killed another because they were fighting on the opposite side of the war.

In the beginning, there are many references to different ways that the speaker could have met his

In the last fifth stanza, the writer ends his poem by saying, “Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down, you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown” (Hardy 17-20). This states that if the narrator and his “foe” had been in different life positions, they could have been good drinking. This also seems that the narrator is having trouble calculating the killing of war and compares himself to his enemy. “Half-a-crown is probably not so much that the narrator imagines the fellow as a beggar as it is that his own character but in a different context” (Napierkowski and Ruby 1). To illustrate narrator’s disgust for the pointless war, he compares himself to the soldier and at the end with the word “you”. This makes the poem giving feelings that are more personal. The man has created the war but it is not man is instinct to murder others. “The Man He Killed” demonstrates the perspective of soldiers with inhumanity in the war battle. Having analyzed the work from Thomas Hardy, we can conclude that through his work, he expresses his feelings in such a beautiful way that the poem is not only dealing with love but also works with critics and