The Man He Killed By Thomas Hardy

“The Man He Killed”: A Reflection of Human Nature Philip Zimbardo, a renowned psychologist known famously for the 1971 Stanford Prison experiment, once said “human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training” In this quote, Zimbardo addresses the perceived reasoning behind any individual’s decision making. Similar to this reasoning, Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed” questions human behavior in relation to impulse, morality, and consequence. When someone makes an impulse decision, that individual is acting based on one’s own personal nature. In this instance, an individual will not think about the action that they are doing, but rather, they simply move based on predisposition. In Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed,” the speaker is recounting a time in which he had acted on impulse during war. It was a matter of survival and both opponents were at an equal stand. Both fired at one another and the speaker just happened to be the one that survived and threw the better shot. The speaker tells of how both men
In Hardy’s “The Man He Killed,” the speaker is given both a reward and a consequence for his action. The action that the speaker had committed was fighting for his life by killing the enemy soldier and the reward for this action was the speaker’s own survival given that the two men were trying to kill each other in the sake of war. The consequence, however, is a heavy conscience for the speaker, since neither men had any previous ties to one another. They were complete strangers totally unaware of each other’s existence until the one moment when they would meet face to face in combat. It is in this way that the speaker of Hardy’s “The Man He Killed,” must undergo the consequence of one’s own circumstantial moral