The Speaker

An unnamed first-person speaker narrates “The Man He Killed.” From the onset of the poem, Hardy positions the speaker as a dramatic storyteller in the everyday vernacular; in addition to his suspenseful telling of a battlefield sequence, how “I shot at him as he at me, / and killed him in his place,” the speaker’s account is peppered with more colloquial and everyday words such as “nipperkin” (4, 7-8). But despite being the storyteller of his own narrative, the speaker lacks agency. Indeed, there is little room for contemplative interiority or expressions of personal agency within the space of Hardy’s poem – the speaker’s narrative proves to be relatively circular. He opens with the conclusion that friendship or enmity is completely dependent on setting and independent of the personal attributes of each of the members of that relationship. His final conclusion in the last stanza is essentially...