The Man He Killed Analysis

Killing and war go hand-in-hand, for the most part. In Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Man I Killed” and Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Man He Killed”, both authors deal with killing the enemy in war. There are similarities and differences between the two authors on how they developed the impact of killing the enemy. O’Brien gives vivid detail about the dead soldier, while Harding does not. Both authors compare their lives with the dead soldier’s. While Harding and O’Brien do compare themselves to the dead man and have the him-or-me mentality, only O’Brien goes into extreme detail on how the dead soldier looked and has multiple viewpoints on killing in war. Harding and O’Brien share several similarities in their depiction of killing a man in war. Both Harding and O’Brien compare the dead man’s life with their own. They project the life they had, leading up to the war, onto the dead soldier. In Harding’s poem, he states: “He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps, Off-hand like -- just as I-- Was out of work -- had sold his traps -- No other reason why. (“The Man He Killed” 13-16)
This is exactly how

Both passages have a him-or-me mindset and the characters project their lives upon the men they killed, although only O’Brien gives vivid detail and multiple attitudes toward killing in war. In O’Brien’s short story, he states, “‘Tim, it’s a war. The guy wasn’t Heidi -- he had a weapon, right? It’s a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring.’” (“The Man I Killed”). Both characters in each passage deal with killing a man in war in ways which are similar, yet strikingly different. Each person who goes to war has their own story to tell; some will be different, some similar. But in the end, it’s only