Leroy's name means "the king." However, when Leroy questions, "Am I still the king around here?" Norma Jean responds by flexing her biceps and checking their firmness. The expression "flexing one's muscles" often symbolizes someone attempting to demonstrate their power. In this situation, Norma Jean is gearing up to assert her independence. In the story's ultimate role reversal, Norma Jean takes the wheel when she and Leroy travel to Shiloh. Leroy, once a long-distance truck driver, now rides in the passenger seat as his wife drives him to the site of the Confederate defeat.

The theme of death runs deeply throughout the narrative of "Shiloh." In the backdrop is the passing of the infant Randy, the sole child of Leroy and Norma Jean. Their rural Kentucky way of life is also disappearing, overshadowed by the emergence of subdivisions and shopping malls. The story's turning point—the breakdown, or "death," of Leroy and Norma Jean's marriage—takes place in the Union cemetery at the Shiloh battlefield. As Norma Jean walks away, having stated her wish to leave Leroy, he "tries to focus on the fact that thirty-five hundred soldiers died on the grounds around him." Each theme explored in the story leads to a form of death: the decline of traditional culture, the collapse of the American Dream, the loss of old identities and roles, and ultimately, the end of the Moffitts' marriage.

When Leroy asks Norma Jean if her behavior is a result of the women’s movement, she tells him not to be silly. Ironically, Norma Jean has been affected more than she knows by feminist ideas and images of women in the media. Leroy compares her to the television character Wonder Woman. Influenced by advertising, she eats “Body Buddies” cereal. Although Norma Jean does not begin lifting weights until after she observes Leroy’s physical therapy, she has seen articles about bodybuilding in magazines sold at the drugstore where she works. She identifies with the film star Marilyn Monroe, whose real name was also Norma Jean. Like many women influenced by feminism, she is taking night courses and planning to leave her husband.

Leroy has also been influenced by the media. One of his pastimes is needlepoint, a practice popularized for men by media coverage when football player Rosey Grier begins doing it. Influenced by television, Leroy makes a Star Trek pillow cover, and he tries to remember if it was on Phil Donahue’s show where he heard that losing a child generally destroys a marriage. Leroy is becoming aware that he should not believe everything that he sees on television or reads. When Randy died suddenly, Leroy was told that it just happens sometimes. Leroy observes that now scientists believe crib death is caused by a virus. Nobody knows anything, he thinks.

Norma Jean’s identification with Marilyn Monroe has ominous implications. Monroe, whose early life was like Norma Jean’s, died at the age of thirty-six from an overdose of sleeping pills, possibly a suicide. She exemplified the classic show-business tragedy. Before they go to Shiloh, Norma Jean tells Leroy that his name means “the king.” This identifies Leroy with Elvis Presley, who was also from a small southern town. Elvis rose to fame and fortune, only to die at age forty-two of health problems complicated by his reliance on drugs. Leroy sometimes used speed on the road, smokes marijuana, and asks Stevie Hamilton what other drugs he has. With those references, Bobbie Ann Mason suggests the potential destructiveness of twentieth century mass culture. Norma Jean also tells Leroy that her name comes from the Normans, who were invaders. This connects to the story’s title and relates Norma Jean to the North, Leroy to the South, in the Civil War.

At Shiloh, Confederate forces ambushed Union troops on April 6, 1862, pushing back the lines of the invading army. The next day Union forces retook the lost ground, pushing the Confederate troops back to Corinth, Tennessee. Neither army won this battle, in which approximately ten thousand men were killed on each side. Leroy ambushed Norma Jean when he came home after his accident. When Mason describes Norma Jean marching through the kitchen doing goose steps, she implies that she has become a soldier in the army of mass culture. Her counterattack on Leroy occurs when she says she wants to leave him. The end of the marriage represents the death of the family in twentieth century society, and of the future, represented by Randy. The baby died in the backseat of their car, while Leroy and Norma Jean watched Doctor Strangelove (1963) at the drive-in—a film about the end of civilization.