In the poems "The Man That He Killed" by Thomas Hardy and "Hitcher" by Simon Armitage, the act of killing is the immediate focus of the writing. Although these acts had the same outcome – a life taken, and a life spared – they were undertaken in extremely different ways. In "The Man That He Killed", the narrator, a soldier, recalls the events of a war in which he was face-to-face with his enemy. At first, he realizes that the person he killed was indeed a person, but he tries to rationalize it for himself by making the excuse that he killed the man because he was his foe, and for no other reason. This leads him to hypothesize about what the man's life may have been like, and how it could have been similar to his own. The narrator of the "Hitcher", …show more content…
The narrator in the second had a clear choice between killing the man and leaving him be. In the entirety of "Hitcher", the narrator does not mention having emotions towards anything, at any time. He appears to be completely neutral throughout the poem. It can be assumed that he feels some sort of stress, and that he must have felt jealousy towards the hitcher; but with the actual act of murdering the hitchhiker he does not feel remorse or empathy. Conversely, the soldier felt quite a bit of empathy towards the man he killed in battle, and he felt under different circumstances it wouldn't have happened, and that he had no choice. The driver did not consider what possible feelings the other man may have had, and he did not compare the man to himself afterwards, showing his lack of empathy or concern for the hitchhiker. This makes it completely clear that these two men have one underlying difference in their actions: the soldier did it out of duty, and the driver did it out of unharnessed anger and jealousy. Although these are both acts of killing, arguably acts of murder, it makes a difference whether or not empathy is