Duty and Personal Responsibility
The narrative's central theme is duty, with each character assigned a particular role to carry out. Donovan is the first to express his sense of duty as the rebels lead the captives into the bog. He explains that four Irishmen have been executed and tells them, "you are to be shot as a reprisal." He then "begins the usual rigmarole about duty and how unpleasant it is." This indicates that his concept of duty is based on following orders from his superiors, which he believes absolves him of personal responsibility for his actions.
As the rebels prepare to carry out the executions, the captives discuss the notion of duty. They acknowledge that by fulfilling their duty, the Irishmen will soon execute them. Wohlgelernter notes that both the Irishmen and the Englishmen now rely on the idea of duty as a justification for "the monstrous acts of evil," referring to the impending cold-blooded executions.
In this story, the men's preoccupation with duty overshadows their sense of personal choice. Each person had the opportunity to defy orders. The rebels could have spared the captives, and the captives could have attempted to escape. However, none of them choose to do so. Personal choice is ignored, and following orders becomes the rebels' primary motivation. The captives also accept that the rebels will follow these orders, thereby implicitly agreeing to the duty those orders represent.
At the story's end, Bonaparte and Noble grapple with their involvement in the executions. Their unwavering commitment to obeying orders without question now leads to a deeper reflection on their lives and their significance. These two men face the consequences of their dutiful actions and are dissatisfied with what they find.
Choice and Consequence
Accompanying duty and responsibility are the consequences linked to the decisions made by the characters. Each soldier in the narrative initially made a choice: to commit to a cause and see it through. The English soldiers enlisted to uphold British authority in Ireland, while the Irish joined the uprising to end British dominance and create an Irish Free State.
They all made their decisions freely and openly. However, in this tale, each character grapples with significant repercussions. The English soldiers must confront, even if momentarily, the possibility of their own deaths due to their initial choice. The Irish fighters will spend the rest of their lives pondering their decisions to join the rebellion and to execute the English soldiers. For everyone involved, the outcomes are far heavier than they had initially expected—the English soldiers are killed, and the Irish must live with this reality indefinitely.
Conflict: Individual vs. Society (Military)
O’Connor’s narrator underscores multiple occasions where personal desires conflict with military directives. While Bonaparte and Noble adhere to their orders, they each display different levels of defiance. When Feeney announces that Hawkins and Belcher are to be executed, Noble resists by refusing to lure them into a trap. Likewise, Bonaparte wishes they would try to flee, knowing he wouldn’t fire at them if they did. Hawkins also contemplates defying his own military by proposing to join the Irish rebels to save his life.
Conflict between Duty and Humanitarianism
The main theme of the story, the conflict between duty and humanitarianism, is clearly enunciated in two signature passages (technically, places in which the author explicitly articulates his theme). The first is in section 3 in the interchange between Donovan and Bonaparte about duty; the second, in section 4, in the interchange between Donovan and Belcher about the same subject. In these and other passages, the story shows that unlike Donovan, Bonaparte and Belcher, as well as Noble, Hawkins, and the old woman, move beyond a circumscribed...
(This entire section contains 238 words.)
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conception of nationalistic duty to a sympathy and compassion for their fellow human beings that transcend the borders and politics of separate countries. Thus, unlike Donovan, the other major characters feel that harming another human being who is both friendly and innocent is wrong, even in the name of patriotic duty. The Englishmen’s “peculiar” expression “chums,” picked up by Bonaparte and Noble and repeated seventeen times in the story, embodies the idea of the paramount importance of friendship or humanitarian sympathy. So, too, does the biblical genealogy that Hawkins scorns as “silly” in one of his arguments with Noble. Hawkins does not realize that Old Testament genealogies suggest by way of descent from a common ancestor the brotherhood of humankind, making humankind a nation that surmounts individual countries—a belief that would have saved his life, which is instead sacrificed because of the conflict between the two countries of England and Ireland.
Moral Theme and Religious References
Hawkins’s twice disparaging the “fairytale” about Adam and Eve picking the forbidden fruit highlights an implied moral theme relating to the conflict of duty and humanitarianism. Reinforced by constant explicit references to religion in the story, largely in Bonaparte’s description of the arguments between Hawkins and Noble on the subject, the Adam and Eve incident recalls the key concept of God’s prohibition against sinful acts, including murder—an issue of central importance in the killings that are contemplated by Donovan and his superiors. Even the old woman’s apparent non sequitur in referring to Jupiter Pluvius early in the story has a bearing on the theme by recalling that the planned killings would have been a moral wrong in the ancient classical religions because foreigners and strangers were under the protection of Zeus or Jupiter, who was patron god of hospitality. Because of a larger sense of duty as moral obligation, these two British soldiers, the story implies, deserve to be “guests of the nation” (the story’s title) in a true sense rather than as a euphemism for “prisoners.”
Conflict between Conscience and Conformity
One of the story’s many fine insights into human nature and behavior derives from its portrayal of the conflict between conscience and conformity. Bonaparte and Noble go along with the plan for the execution, despite serious reservations. What overrides their moral objection is the pressure exerted by peers (Donovan and Feeney, the local intelligence officer) and by social situation. Many instances from real life, as in the Holocaust of World War II, demonstrate the applicability of this theme.
