Liam O Flaherty's The Sniper

In conclusion, the stories “The Sniper” and “Cranes” both prove that “war is hell” making them kill people even if they are relatives or friends. Lastly, “The Sniper” is more effective in a way because he killed his brother without knowing it was him, he just knew he had to kill the

The story begins with a Republican sniper laying watching and eating from a roof-top. O’Flaherty introduces the protagonist as having “the eyes of a man who is used to looking at death”, this suggest that the young sniper boy has been in the war for some time now and has been very successful

In the story The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty is about a Republican sniper watching over Dublin, Ireland. The story is set in the Irish Civil War. The author uses mood and foreshadowing to show and tell that war tears families apart.

Lastly, the war changed the sniper by misplacing him. The sniper is described as a young person. “His face was the face of a student, thin and aesthetic, but his eyes had the cold gleam of the fanatic.” The use of strong adjectives such as “thin and aesthetic” and “the cold gleam of a fanatic” show how the sniper is misplaced in this environment. Further into the text, youthful guilt became apparent. “The sniper looked at his enemy falling and he shuddered. The lust of battle died in him. He became bitten with remorse.” This use of metaphor shows the reader how quickly his emotions change, showing his guilt and regret for what he has done. Lastly, the snipers curiosity was influenced, as he felt he needed to find out the identity of his victim. He felt this because of how the misplacement had

Symbolism is also used in “The Sniper” to represent a possible theme. Liam O’Flaherty uses a street between the two snipers to show that a possible theme is that war separates family. The story takes place in the middle of a civil war in Ireland. The protagonist is a sniper across the street from an enemy sniper. The enemy sniper is his brother, and it is unknown until the very last sentence. By including a minor detail such as a street, the author is able to both further develop the setting by showing it as urban and let the reader pick up on a theme of the

“Wars never hurt anybody except for the people who died” -Salvador Dali, leader of the Surrealist Movement. In both stories men who are at war are described, both of these men have killed a man who are known as their foes. Both of the men realize that the man they killed could've been a friend, and were someone who really wasn't the enemy. The relationship between these two stories is that war can tear families apart. In Liam O'Flaherty's “The Sniper” and “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy both show similarities and differences in plot, irony, and theme.

"The Sniper" places a strong emphasis on the evils of war, and yet paints a vivid image of mankind's qualities and their society. Employing the technique of describing one particular sniper to symbolise a general subject, readers are able to gain a deep insight into the evils of war. In this story, the assembly of setting, contrasting characters and themes of fanaticism and division of loyalties are vital to conveying the horror of war. On the other hand, "The Sniper" also discusses the power of war, depicting it as the decider of life and death for men. Its force is further emphasised when neighbours are turned into enemies under war's influence.

A historical allusion lies in this text as a reference to the Irish civil war between the Republicans and the Free Staters. “The Sniper” takes place in Dublin, Ireland, but this means nothing unless it takes place like it does during “…the Irish civil war of the early 1920s” (Korb 225). This allusion to the civil war in Ireland acts as a great reference to history while trying to communicate the idea of how civil war divides an entire country as a whole. The reason that this allusion communicates so well lies in the fact that it brings the mind to reality, instead of viewing “The Sniper” as a made up story. In this story exists a situational irony that comes across as the biggest point of the story, in which a sniper kills his brother. Out of the entire story the biggest point “…emphasizes one of the greatest ironies of civil war: Brother is pitted against brother” (Shuman 3). This acts as situational irony because no one expects that the enemy sniper could turn out as the brother of the Republican sniper. This irony shows how war does not only affect the soldiers but their families as well because they have to suffer the death of their children. Finally, the fact that “The Sniper” takes place in Dublin at the Four Courts represents with imagery what happens there, how civil war destroys the people’s history and culture. The fighting of the Irish civil war takes place in the streets of Dublin for a while and “…around the beleaguered Four Courts where the heavy guns roar[]” (O'Flaherty 1). The way that this shows how the entire country becomes affected, exists in how the Four Courts lay under siege with cannons firing around them. The people’s culture and history becomes destroyed by being under siege and thus indirectly does hurt the people of Ireland. Allusion, situational irony, and imagery all assist the message that civil war affects the

War covets the aspect of man that is man itself, for it craves to morph them into mere objects and targets. For many soldiers, they succumb to such a fate; being depleted their ability to feel immediate emotion, they develop primitive, animalistic urges of bloodlust during a time of bloodshed. The aspects of war gravely impacts a person, and as such can be seen in O’Flaherty’s character “the sniper,” as well as seen in O’Brien’s character “Private Paul Berlin.” The sniper is a victim to the war’s cold, emotionless embrace. A Republican soldier, he is, divided from his brothers in arms on the other side, the ones called the “Free Staters.” Nonetheless, under the circumstances, they all are pawns to Dublin’s chess table of a civil war, being played at the mercy of the war’s

     The sniper develops insensitivity to death during the war. When he kills the old woman, she’s trying to run away and isn’t really a threat. He even “utters a cry of joy” when he finally shoots the enemy sniper. This shows how war can get people caught up in the cat-and-mouse “game” aspect of it and forget what they’re actually doing—killing people. People get so caught up in the “game” that they don’t think about the repercussions for their actions.

In the short story, “The Sniper”, by Liam O’Flaherty, the character undergoes changes throughout the story. The first way the character undergoes changes is by how he feels after killing someone. When he is being targeted, he tricks his enemy and shoots at him. During that scene the story

“The Sniper” by Liam O’ Flaherty is a short story about a sniper, set in the

In the short story, The Sniper, O’Flaherty explored the theme that a person’s desire to live can consume all of his or her humanity. One example of the theme was when the sniper shot and killed an old woman when she told an enemy tank his location. “The sniper fired again. The woman whirled around and fell with a shriek…” Although the old woman was threatening his life by informing on him, killing an old woman in any situation should be a traumatic experience for anyone, particularly a younger soldier, whose face was like a student’s. However, he had shown no hesitation in shooting her. When he put iodine on his bullet wound, he is able to feel the pain because his external sensors for pain have not been numbed by war. By contrast, his internal

In 1923, the story “The Sniper” was written by Liam O'Flaherty. The story is about a Civil war in Ireland where there were 2 snipers, shooting at each other and they were both on a rooftop with long-range weapons and they don’t know each other but at the end one of the sniper found out that he killed his own brother. The author uses irony and the conflict between the sniper and the other sniper just to tell us the main message which is that we shouldn’t fight each other, we should fight together because we live in the same country and we should fight for our country.

One popular short story that Liam O’Flaherty wrote was “The Sniper”. This story takes place in the city of Dublin, the present day capital of Ireland, amidst the Irish Civil War. A young man close to his college years was atop a roof with his rifle, laying in silence. The young man had lit a cigarette, but as he did, a bullet streaked by his head. He then turned and saw