Taking the perspective of an ordinary soldier, “The Man He Killed” illuminates the psychology of a man struggling to come to terms with his own actions. Though never saying it outright, the speaker appears to feel tremendous guilt, even as he works hard to justify his actions to himself. In some ways, the speaker’s informal speech belies the complexity of the devastating moral question he grapples with: how does one balance duty against humanity? The frequent pauses in the poem echo the speaker’s own uncertainty, and the poem itself plays out as a battle between two dueling perspectives, jumping back and forth between reality and the hypothetical, between the speaker’s actions as a soldier and his musings about the man he killed. This struggle is purely internal—from an outsider’s perspective, the speaker performed his job admirably in killing his enemy, yet he cannot seem to adopt this view. He tries to convince himself of the rationality of his actions, but with a single “although,” his thoughts turn swiftly back to the life of the other man. 

In the end, the speaker appears unable to resolve this dilemma, so he backs away into a generalization: “quaint and curious war is!” This banal and flippant conclusion, seemingly at odds with the weight of the speaker’s internal struggle, underscores the inherent absurdity of war itself.  

In “The Man He Killed,” Thomas Hardy examines the dissociation of war, which not only displaces a soldier physically from his home but also removes him emotionally from his conscience. War takes the speaker far away from his ordinary life back home, immersing him in a new world with wildly different expectations for behavior. The juxtaposition between the life of a common man and the life of a soldier is heightened by the disconnect between the speaker’s hypothetical musings and the reality of his life. Though he thinks about it, the speaker is no longer free to merely stop down to the local pub for a drink and chat the afternoon away with a friend. Instead, he must remain in camp and under the authority of the officers.

War also brings the speaker onto the battlefield, where he is ordered to shoot at other men. He is obligated to see these enemies as “other” and alien, a dissociation is perhaps a necessity if he is to end their lives. However, though he kills the other man, the speaker cannot seem to achieve the complete dissociation that war requires. Rather than ignoring it, the speaker dwells on the humanity of the foe he has just shot—what’s more, the speaker sees in him a man much like himself, a man he could easily sit down with at the inn, had they met under normal circumstances. Indeed, the poem seems to imply that nothing about war is normal. Through the casual musings of the speaker, Hardy suggests that it’s unnatural—maybe even impossible—for a soldier to be so wholly disconnected from his humanity that he can kill without being deeply affected himself. 

“The Man He Killed” shatters the myths of a noble war and the gallant, patriotic soldier by exploring war through the eyes of a common man. In imagining the motives of the man he killed, the speaker discloses his own mundane reasons for joining the army. Apparently having given little thought to the life of a soldier or the requirements of this profession, the speaker characterizes his decision to enlist as “Off-hand like,” meaning it was not seriously considered. Speculating about the man he...