An essential feature of Nigerian literatures is their capacity to exploit history and social experience to bring to light the human condition in society without compromising literary aesthetics. Thus, Nigerian novels often appear to be more educative than entertaining by their ability to illuminate social realities far more effectively than historical or sociological texts. This is evident in the representations of soldiers in Nigerian novels which are highly influenced by historical and social circumstances. This paper carries out a comparative and descriptive analysis of portrayals of Nigerian soldiers in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes from a new historical perspective. Most studies on the military in Nigerian novels often focus on their actions in war situations and their disruptive and undemocratic activities in politics. However, these studies frequently explore the military as a group with little attention to the texts as expositions on character types in the Nigerian military. This study therefore contributes to criticism on the nexus between literary representation, history, and society. It further highlights historical and social contexts of military explorations in Nigerian novels and their impacts on the perception of the Nigerian soldier in society. These are aimed at showing that depictions of the military in Nigerian novels go beyond their capacities for disruptions and destructions in society; they represent artistic probing of the nature and character of persons in the Nigerian military.

尼日利亚文学的一个基本特征是它们能够在不损害文学美学的情况下利用历史和社会经验来揭示社会中的人类状况。因此，尼日利亚小说往往比历史或社会学文本更有效地阐明社会现实，因此似乎更具教育意义而不是娱乐性。这在受历史和社会环境影响很大的尼日利亚小说中的士兵表现中很明显。本文对伊西多尔·奥克佩的《最后的责任》和费斯图斯·伊亚伊的《英雄》中尼日利亚士兵的刻画进行了比较和描述性分析。从新的历史角度。大多数尼日利亚小说中关于军队的研究往往集中在他们在战争局势中的行动以及他们在政治上的破坏性和不民主的活动。然而，这些研究经常将军队作为一个群体进行探索，而很少关注作为对尼日利亚军队中字符类型的说明的文本。因此，这项研究有助于批评文学表现、历史和社会之间的关系。它进一步突出了尼日利亚小说中军事探索的历史和社会背景及其对尼日利亚士兵在社会中的看法的影响。这些旨在表明尼日利亚小说中对军队的描述超出了他们对社会的破坏和破坏的能力；