In Guests of the Nation by Frank O'Connor, the narrator, called Bonaparte by his fellow rebels, recounts his reluctant role in the execution of two English soldiers for retaliation for the massacre of four Irish rebels. O'Connor develops this conflict between revolutionary attitudes in the tense relationship between the narrator and Jeremiah Donovan, the experienced rebel, who is responsible for carrying out the Second Battalion's order to shoot the prisoners. The young revolutionary Bonaparte discovers, in his imprudent acceptance of the group's values, the evil within himself. Against his ideal of actions appropriate to him as an individual, Bonaparte and his fellow revolutionary Noble, at the insistence of their superior officer who claims that their duty as soldiers requires executions, participate in the murder of two English hostages who lived between them as friends for many months. For both young men, their action is a profound betrayal of the soul. The narrative uses the participant's first-person point of view to dramatize the irony. Protagonist, Bonaparte's narration takes place in a distant future, many years away from the event he recounts; the vividness and immediacy of his story indicate how he was forever marked by his early experiences. The older Bonaparte presents himself as a young soldier at ease with his prisoners, but only gradually comes to sense that these friends may have to be killed. O'Connor begins the story misleadingly. The opening paragraph establishes both that the men are becoming "comrades" (the word becomes ironic as their friendship breaks down) and that they spend a lot of time playing cards, an activity that not only breaks the military bar... ... half of the sheet ...... previously held, alienated from his own people, including from his pleasant companion Noble and the old woman in whose house they were staying; alienated from both earth and sky, and “from birds and bloody stars” (O'Connor 5). The welcoming twilight that opens the narrative gives way to darkness. The pleasant community of jokes and card games is replaced by isolation. The young soldier, who at the beginning of the story felt like an adult, at the end feels "very small, very lost and alone, like a child lost in the snow". (O'Connor 5). The last sentence, "And whatever happened to me after that, I never felt the same again," indicates the permanent break between the narrator's morally comfortable youth and his current pain. He feels isolated from the nation in whose cause he killed both a friend-enemy and his young, patriotic self.