Theme vs Moral Paragraph

“Guests of the Nation,” a short story by Frank O’Connor, has a simple moral, but a very complex theme.  The moral of the story, reflected in the horrible things that the main character is forced to do, is that it is important to think before you do something that someone tells you to do, and that what seems wrong to you is usually wrong.  The story, however, explores a much broader and more complex theme, a theme about war and all of its gruesome realities.  The author describes in much detail the horrible things that war makes the soldiers do to good people.  When Hawkins is killed, the soldiers were forced to watch him painfully die, “We all stood very still, watching him settle out in the last agony” (O’Connor 24). These soldiers watched someone who had done nothing wrong live out his last moments in agony, adding to the theme of war and hardship.  We see two people get executed due to orders given by a higher power.  Once again, the theme and the moral are separate entities, although similar, the moral is much more specific.  This is an important thing to keep in mind when reading literature.