Duryodhana's defeat, the moment the whole epic has been building toward since the childhood rivalry of Adi Parva, is deliberately denied a fully honorable resolution: Bhima's illegal blow below the waist, prompted by Krishna's intervention, mirrors the pattern already set by Bhishma's and Drona's deaths, each major Kaurava commander falling not to open, rule-bound combat alone but to some form of strategic exception Krishna engineers at the decisive moment, a recurring structure many readers and commentators take as the epic's deliberate, unresolved commentary on the moral cost even a just cause pays to secure victory.
Shalya's divided loyalty, uncle to two of the men he fights against, commanding the army opposing his own nephews out of an earlier promise extracted through Duryodhana's hospitality and cunning, exemplifies a pattern of conflicted allegiance that runs throughout the war books, in which characters repeatedly find themselves bound by prior vows to fight against those they love, a tension the epic treats as a serious and painful feature of a world governed by strict codes of honor and obligation rather than as a simple plot device. The parva's compressed pace, several major deaths in quick succession after the sprawling earlier war books, gives the war's ending a deliberately abrupt, exhausted quality that many readers find fits its subject better than a more triumphant, drawn-out climax would.