There’s Your Moral

“There’s your moral,” a soldier declares, gesturing at an absolutely meaningless object.
 The soldiers have found, as O’Brien conveys in his novel, that there is no moral to war, no concrete meaning, or lesson, or right or wrong. A common theme across more than one of the war poems we studied is that war is not a natural thing; it is not something that humans can understand, it is too extreme. This can be applied to an analysis of this novel to support the point that there is no moral to be found in war.
In the chapter entitled “how to tell a true war story,” O’Brien writes of the contradictions of a war. War is pain, but it is also beauty. War is death, but in it the soldiers have never felt more alive. There is an ambiguity to war which O’Brien likens to a thick and all consuming fog, blurring the once crystal clear boundaries between right and wrong. Not during the war and not even decades after can O’Brien tease out a meaning, a purpose, a lesson from the war in which he fought. The only moral, he has found, is that there is no moral to be found.